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He fitted his setting, and went with Lady Calderton, æsthetically, as well as along the Vale of Life. Not that he had gone far down it, for he didn't look a day more than fifty, though he may have been several days more. Some fifteen years older than his wife, I thought.

If only Anthony were as amenable and attractive as his mother thought him, my lines were indeed now cast in pleasant places.

Pleasant! Could one but have foreseen....

"His mother will tell you all about Anthony," continued the General. "I can sum up all I've got to say, by asking you to do the impossible. Anyway, you'll try, I'm sure. What I want is for him to get, here at home, all that he is missing by not going to School, if you see what I mean."

I murmured that I did understand, and would do my best.

"I don't for one moment suppose he will go into the Army, and I certainly shan't put any pressure on him, but I'd like him to go to the Varsity; and I am hoping that, by that time, he'll be sufficiently normal and ordinary to pass in a crowd. Being what he is, he'd have a bad time at a Public School. He has, in point of fact, though a brief one. But at Oxford--at Magdalen or Christ Church, say--I don't see why he should be very different from the average undergraduate, having been in the right kind of tutor's hands for four or five years."