1

When Kathleen was nine and a half, Mr. Beauchamp moved the family back to town to No. 75 Tinakori Road, several squares further up the hill toward the Botanical Gardens. Again this was a home more quickly welcomed by the children than by the adults:

“Our house in Tinakori Road stood far back from the road. It was a big, white-painted square house with a slender pillared verandah and balcony running all the way round it. In the front from the verandah edge the garden sloped away in terraces and flights of concrete steps—down—until you reached the stone wall covered with nasturtium that had three gates let into it—the visitors' gate, the tradesman's gate, and a huge pair of old iron gates that were never used and clashed and clamoured when Bogey and I tried to swing on them.

“Tinakori Road was not fashionable; it was very mixed. Of course there were some good houses in it, old ones, like ours for instance, hidden away in wildish gardens, and there was no doubt that land there would become extremely valuable, as Father said, if one bought enough and hung on.

“It was high, it was healthy; the sun poured in all the windows all day long, and once we had a decent tramway service, as Father argued….

“But it was a little trying to have one's own washerwoman living next door who would persist in attempting to talk to Mother over the fence, and then, just beyond her ‘hovel,’ as Mother called it, there lived an old man who burned leather in his back yard whenever the wind blew our way. And further along there lived an endless family of half-castes who appeared to have planted their garden with empty jam tins and old saucepans and black iron kettles without lids. And then just opposite our house there was a paling fence and below the paling fence in a hollow, squeezed in almost under the fold of a huge gorse-covered hill, was Saunders’ Lane.”

The children were strictly forbidden to venture into that narrow and mysterious lane where women with shawls over their heads slipped furtively. Its grubbiness as Little George Street, afterward, was nothing to what it had been as Saunders' Lane.

The new house faced it … almost looked down upon it, in fact, but they could learn to pretend it was not there. They could look across, at the Tinakori Hills.

The girls had a room so high up it was like being on a ship; and they might see the Harbour again as they used to, at No. II, when they were very small. Kathleen loved hanging out of this window, like a bird from a branch, at those secret hours which open a new world: late at night, when the city enclosing the Harbour was a city of stars, and the Southern Cross dipped low in the sky. The coal hulks far beyond Pipeta Point were indistinct shapes, each with one green and one red light; and the tiny ships “all hung with bright beads” put out across the Harbour toward the South Island.

And early, early:

“Four o'clock. Is it light now at four o'clock? I jump out of the bed and run over to the window. It is half-light, neither black nor blue. The wing of the coast is violet; in the lilac sky are black banners and little black boats manned by black shadows put out on the purple water.

“Oh! how often I have watched this hour when I was a girl! But then—I stayed at the window until I grew cold—until I was icy—thrilled by something —I did not know what.”

Below in the garden—beneath the tennis courts (where they had tournaments some days), beneath the lily lawn, was the violet bed and the old peartree:

“‘Do you remember the enormous number of pears that used to be on that old tree?’ …

“‘And how after there's been a Southerly Buster we used to go out with clothes baskets to pick them up?’

“‘And how while we stooped they went on falling, bouncing on our backs and heads?’

“‘And how far they used to be scattered, ever so far, under the violet leaves, down the steps, right down to the lily-lawn? We used to find them trodden in the grass. And how soon the ants got to them. I can see now that little round hole with a sort of fringe of brown pepper round it.’ …

“‘They were so bright, canary yellow—and small. And the peel was so thin and the pips jet—jet black. First you pulled out the little stem and sucked it. It was faintly sour, and then you ate them always from the top—core and all?’ …

“‘Do you remember sitting on the pink garden seat?”

“‘It always wobbled a bit and there were usually the marks of a snail on it.’

“‘Sitting on that seat, swinging our legs and eating the pears’.”

Perhaps it had as much magic for her as any “wildish garden” which Kathleen Beauchamp— or Katherine Mansfield—ever knew.

There was the mother, walking about, pointing to some stem, some branch of blossom:“Look, dear! Isn't that lovely! See! how lovely!” Flowers seemed to have more reality to her than anything outside her own family. As soon as she entered the big gates below the flight of concrete stairs, she would call:“Children! Children!” And in the evenings, as they played about the garden, she was on her husband's arm:

“The stillness, the lightness, the steps on the gravel —the dark trees, the flowers, the night-scented stocks —what happiness it was to walk with him there. What he said did not really matter so very much. But she felt she had to be herself in a way that no other occasion granted her. She felt his ease and although he never looked at what she pointed out to him it did not matter. His ‘Very nice, dear!’ was enough. He was always planning, always staring towards a future. ‘I should like later on.’ But she—she did not in the least; the present was all she loved and dwelt in.”

Her life revolved inside the palings of her home, illuminated by the flowers in her garden, which overflowed into her house. Was it from her that the girls got this way of noticing some flower, some twig—even with unappreciative people? They all did it. They all noticed them in this way. Kathleen Beauchamp, as she grew up, was for ever pointing out something:“Look! How lovely!” It was page 129 not—as many people afterward thought—because New Zealand abounded in strange and gorgeous bloom. In fact, New Zealand has few, few wild flowers, and those few are small and white:

“Oh, how I love flowers! People always say it must be because I spent my childhood among all those gorgeous tropical trees and blossoms. But I don't seem to remember us making daisy chains of magnolias—do you?' (she wrote to Chaddie, years later).

It was rather the quality of her feeling for the ones she had—both in her childhood in New Zealand— and during her life, afterward:

“To feel the flame at your throat as you used to imagine you felt the spot of yellow when Bogey held a buttercup under your chin.”

She saw Karori—saw Wellington—almost as though she looked at them through a flowering bush. And at 75 Tinakori Road, the parlour, the dining-room, were seen through this flowering bush too. She wrote to Chaddie (Marie):

“Cinerarias … blue ones—and the faint, faint pink kind. Mother loved them and we used to grow masses in a raised flower bed. I love the shape of the petals. It is so delicate. We used to have blue ones in pots in a rather white and gold drawing room that had green wooden sunblinds. Faint light, big cushions, tables with ‘photographs of the children’ in silver frames, some little yellow and black cups and saucers that belonged to Napoleon in a high cupboard and some one playing Chopin—beyond words playing Chopin.”

and

“It's strange we should all of us Beauchamps have this passion for flowers…. I have a large bunch of good old-fashioned marigolds on my table, buds, leaves, and all. They take me back to the black vase of ours at 75, one that you (Marie) used to like to put mignonette in. It was a charming vase and well in the van of fashion, wasn't it? Do you remember the brown china (bear) on the top of the black what-not? I can see it!”

It was not the flowers in themselves that Katherine was then remembering—but flowers as the setting and the passion of the family at No. 75—flowers as the key to the life of the family there. At the memory of the flowers,“all the life of that house flickers up, trembles, glows again, is rich again.” Those were words written by Katherine to John Galsworthy in praise of his picture of the Soames's house in Bayswater Road, to which she responded as one who had also known and savoured the rich reality of Victorian middle-class life. She, too, could go back into a kindred past,

“back to the dining-room at 75, to the proud and rather angry-looking seltzogene on the sideboard, with the little bucket under the spout. Do you remember that hiss it gave and sometimes a kind of groan? And the smell inside the sideboard of Worcester sauce and corks from old claret bottles?”

In this family, and the life they lived so closely together—with “things” so important to them, there was a kind of unity, partly because of the harmony between the father and mother—because she satisfied his needs so well and asked for nothing further—partly because (as in all New Zealand homes) the children were trained by the parents, page 131 not by a nurse. They were brought up in “the English tradition,” the mid-Victorian tradition, really; yet the contact between children and parents was much closer than in most English homes because in New Zealand the scarcity of maids for the household, and nurses for the children, demands a still closer contact. So there was a sense of living their lives together, of overlapping almost, of the whole family revolving about in one main current. It was in this way that Kezia—that Laura—remembered No. 75:

“The father in his dressing-room—a familiar talk. His using her (the mother's) hair brushes—his passion for things that wear well. The children sitting around the table—a light outside; the silver. Her pity as she sees them all gathered together—her longing for them always to be there.”

and

“Aunt Beryl, Aunt Harriet and Mother sat at the round table with big shallow teacups in front of them. In the dusky light, with their white puffed-up muslin blouses with wing sleeves, they were three birds at the edge of a lily pond. Beyond them the shadowy room melted into the shadowy air; the cut glass door-knob glittered—a song, a white butterfly with wings out spread—clung to the ebony piano.”

It was this very sense of the tide sweeping in, sweeping out, bearing them all together in its swing to and from the beach and out to the sea again— the sense that their rhythm was from their unity— that they all seemed caught together in the ebb and flow of their lives—it was this sense which made Kass (“the odd one”) feel her separateness. The page 132 very things which bound the others together, seemed to help to cast her out. She was “different.” They had simply “the family feeling”; she was inoculated with something foreign:

“… I remember one birthday when you (Jeanne) bit me! It was the same one when I got a doll's pram and in a rage let it go hurling by itself down the grassy slope outside the conservatory. Father was awfully angry and said no one was to speak to me. Also the white azalea, bush was out. And Aunt Belle had brought from Sydney a new receipt for icing. It was tried on my cake, and it wasn't a great success because it was much too brittle. I can see and feel its smoothness now.”

Her life was becoming a medley of living in the family's way, and living in strange, fierce, inexplicable ways of her own.

2

The Wellington Girls' College was a ten- or fifteen-minute walk down from Tinakori Road toward the Quay. It was a huge grey frame building, built about a year before Kathleen was born— the second girls' school to be established in Wellington. The first (built on Fitzherbert Terrace nearly ten years previous) was the more “exclusive” Terrace School to which the girls were sent three years later.

When Kathleen Beauchamp registered for the Second Form on May 25th, 1898, at nine years and seven months, the Wellington Girls' College was still a private school. The Prep. School was at the page 133 front of the building, on the top floor, at the left of the high wooden tower. Seven girls sat in that small square room on the hard wooden benches of the Second Form. A large fireplace at the south end warmed them when the winds whipped across Lambton Harbour and whirled about the barn-like, unprotected school. Kathleen, from where she sat, could watch the waves lifting—lifting as far as she could see; and the white line of foam running up to the scalloped bays. She loved a choppy sea; it was her favourite sea—brilliant blue with an edge of white. But she hated the Southerly Buster in winter, when newspapers flew like kites down Thorndon Esplanade. The phutukawas (which in Auckland flaunted crimson plumage so proudly) were bowed abjectly on the Esplanade, too twisted and bent to bloom. In spring she could watch the leaves shaking in the tree tops about St. Paul's. There was “a kind of whiteness in the sky over the sea,” then. She loved such days.

Marie, with her sandy hair dragged back by a comb she abominated, was in the same form. She and Kass were dressed alike. Vera was threatened with a disease which kept her away from school for the second and third terms. The five other girls were Alice, dark with Irish eyes (her father was Governor of the Fiji Islands); Esma Dean, her cousin, a fair, self-centred girl who lived with her; Zoe (Kass liked Zoe for some reason), slight and sweet, with wavy brown hair and a fringe; Irene, swarthy, straight-haired, appearing even darker in her short purple frock as she stood before the others reciting The Revenge in a deep voice with a great page 134 deal of gusto; and Marion Ruddick, Kathleen's special friend. How excited she had been on the day she exclaimed to Marion:“I'm so glad you're just the kind of a girl you are!” and Marion had said the same to her.

Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp had returned from their last trip to Canada on the same ship with the Ruddicks; Mr. Ruddick was in the Government service in Wellington. When the mother introduced Marion to the children, they greeted her politely in the way they had been taught; but Kass stared solemnly at the new girl. She was so prettily dressed. Little girls of New Zealand wore clumsilycut, home-made frocks which made them appear even fatter than they were from the good butter and jams and cream buns of their six-times-tea.

Marion was a slim Canadian child in a well-cut sailor suit and pretty shoes. She had a style, a way of wearing her clothes, unknown among Wellington children. Her hair was in a fringe and loose dark curls. She had the glamour of a girl who had come across the South Sea from a country which had snow at Christmas. So Kass decided to like her and to speak to her.“Do you have parrots in Canada?” she said.

Marion shared many things with her in playtime and at school. The best was the Green Gate. The worst was Miss Wilson—the strictest Mistress at the Prep. School—a stern-looking woman with crinkly black hair and a bright purple blouse. She never was satisfied with Marion's light, spiderish handwriting; and when in sewing class, Kathleen's plump, inky fingers damply infused the stain into the page 135 white fabric, the results were tragic. Both girls stood in awe of Miss Wilson, but they quickly saw through the defences of another Mistress who came to them for one class; and all that they suffered at Miss Wilson's hands, they gave back (with the interest of a few added inventions of their own) to her. She found—not seven well-bred little girls with a lesson learned—but a rooster, a bee, a donkey, a laughing jackass, a “more pork,” a kitten, a cuckoo. And—after rapping a row of little dents in the desk with her ruler—after mildly protesting that “this wasn't a Zoo” —she left at the end of the hour reduced to despair, almost in tears.

At play-time, though the Prep. School had no real right in the Gym., Marion and Kass usually were first down. A rope, knotted at both ends, hung suspended from the ceiling. Each clinging to an end, they took turns in leaping from the mantelpiece and swinging out wildly the length of the long room and back again. One day they got into an argument as to who should swing first. Marion leaped into space with her end. Kass, not waiting for her to swing back, plunged furiously after her, and they met in mid-air with a terrific impact. Marion, the light child, was hurled to the floor, where she lay stunned, until Irene ran to revive her with water.

After the Karori Primary School the girls found even this elementary Prep. School difficult, for their preparation was uneven. They had to take some of their classes with Form I. Kass had been so clever in arithmetic at Karori; but here she descended to page 136 the First Form, though she was top of it at the end of her third term.

That was a proud prize-giving day for Kathleen Beauchamp—December, 1899. It was a summer evening. Her father, mother, grandmother, Marie, and Vera went with her to the big school hall, decorated with flags and foliage from the bush. While the College girls sang Christmas carols and two-part songs, Kass and Marie sat with their father and mother on the long form benches, twisting the corners of their starched Sunday pinafores, until their names were called out by Dr. John Innes for the awards. The visitors applauded dutifully, while the girls went up to receive, from the Chief Justice, the prizes they had won. Kass went up for three: one in Form II. for English (which meant literature, composition, history and geography); and two for Form I.—arithmetic and French. Marie had a prize for needlework for Form II. Even though some other girl had won the special recitation prize, it was a famous time. The winners were named in The Dominion that evening; and they were listed in The Reporter, the school magazine, which included Kathleen's second printed “story.”

Mr. Beauchamp had been Justice of the Peace in Karori. He was visiting Justice in Wellington. In view of his later almost unprecedented move: sending his daughters “home” to college—the speech which followed the prize-giving was perhaps one of the most important which Kathleen Beauchamp ever sat through:

“Sir Robert Stout congratulated the students; page 137 he said reports showed parents that the children obtained the best possible education at the school; that it was now recognized they must have not only higher education, but also higher education for women. Men and women were on the same platform now in almost everything and it would be a disgrace to the community if it did not make as ample provision for the higher education of girls and women as it did for that of boys and men. They were still far behind other countries in that respect. If they examined statistics of the United States they would find that relative to population, N.Z. did not have at her high schools and colleges half the number of boys and girls or lads and lasses that she ought to have receiving higher education. He knew the great struggle there had been in Wellington even to maintain the Girls' H.S. He said the G.H.S. was praised for the high place students had gained in Wellington College. In conclusion, after some words of counsel to the students, he urged the claims of the school to the support of the citizens, who, he hoped, would strain every nerve to give their children higher education. Parents who gave their children higher education gave them better dowry than money.”

Even after thirty years, Vera remembered Kathleen's excitement that night over her printed “story.” The first printed criticism of her work had appeared the year before (1898) when she was nine. It was written by the Sixth Form Editor of The Reporter as a footnote to her first published sketch:

“This story, written by one of the girls who have lately entered the school, shows promise of great page 138 merit. We shall always be pleased to receive contributions from members of the lower forms.—Ed.”

3

In their short holidays the children followed the little scalloped bays along the shore to Island Bay. Island Bay was just a suburb of Wellington around the point toward Happy Valley. It was all inlets and rocky caves; a wild man lived in one of them (so they said). He made the expedition uncertain and daring; but unlike Old Underwood, he hid himself well away and so was rarely cornered. Long afterward, Kathleen wrote to Mr. Ruddick:

“Does Marion remember Island Bay, I wonder, and bathing her doll in the rock pools with me? … I wonder if she has forgotten our games at Miss Partridge's, or old Miss Partridge's way of saying: ‘Oh, I'm so tired!’ Or the cream buns we were given for tea. I must say I think the cream buns should have been withheld from me, though.”

The girls learned to swim and dive, in those days, at the Thorndon Sea Baths, below the Quay, where they were taken three times a week. For years they remembered the seaweedy odour, the gritty marmalade sandwiches which they devoured afterward, and the lemonade they drank while the elders drank tea.

There were games: tennis on the hard court at No. 75; and, while they lived there—billiards.

“… Billiards…. It's a fascinating game. I remember learning to hold a cue at Sir Joseph Ward's, and I can see now R.'s super refinement as if she page 139 expected each ball to be stamped with a coronet before she would deign to hit it.”

There were a few parties, usually for tea, but an occasional one in the evening when they were “invited out,” and brought “slippers in a satin bag.” Sometimes there were dances of the kind authorised then:

“Somewhere quite near someone is playing very old-fashioned dance tunes on a cheap piano, things like the Lancers, you know. Some minute part of me not only dances to them but goes faithfully through Ladies in the Centre, Visiting, Set to Corners, and I can even feel the sensation of clasping warm young hands in white silk gloves, and shrinking from Maggie Owen's hand in Ladies' Chain because she wore no gloves at all.”

After they had moved back to town, Mr. Beauchamp bought the country place at Day's Bay, near Mirimar, for the children's long holidays.

There was no road around the edge of the Harbour then; the only way to reach the Bay was by The Duke or The Duchess, sailing across Lambton Harbour. Often the girls held each other's heads for that rough half hour. Day's Bay was a quiet place, a paradise for children. Zoe was at a cottage near the Beauchamps' and the Walter Nathans were not far away; but except for a pavilion occasionally open for entertainment, these few families had the Bay to themselves. Kass and Marion spent their December summer holidays there. To the Canadian child, this semi-tropical life was filled with surprise :

“When we weren't paddling in the sea, we were digging sand castles with marvellous moats and draw- page 140 bridges. Zoe initiated us into the joys of shrimping in the rock pools; and we loved seeing shrimps back, in their silly way, into the nets. We thought it cruel to have them plunged into boiling water alive, but the assurance that they were killed instantly, and the lovely salmony pink colour they turned to from a dull greenish grey, compensated us for the boiling process. From delving in the rock pools, we evolved the idea of rock pool gardens; each selecting a pool, we collected seaweed, pearly shells, coloured stones, sea anemones and star fish. I vaguely remember Christmas at the Bay. I gave Kass a thimble in a green plush case, and felt at the time that she would have much preferred a book. To Jeanne I gave a pink and white dolls' teapot, which she still talks about. ‘Chummie’ had a toy dancing bear, and that is all I remember except a present that I received of a large mauve box of chocolate almonds with a pair of gilt tongs on top. It was my first real box of sweets— from a friend of my father—and Kass and I were both quite overcome by such magnificence.”

The quietness of Day's Bay became, for Katherine Mansfield, a standard of stillness. It was only of the heightened sense of absolute stillness produced by isolation and illness and “a sky like lead” that she could say it was “much quieter than Day's Bay.” That meant a superhuman, or even an inhuman stillness—the quietness that descends upon one who has drifted out of life itself. The quietness of Day's Bay represented a perfection of human stillness, friendly and benign. It was of Day's Bay and her summers there that she was thinking when, in a mood of happiness in a Paris spring,—when, as she walked,“the air just lifts enough to blow on your cheeks. Ah, how delicious that is!” —she tried to make a present of her happiness to a friend.

“There is a wharf not far from here where the sand barges unload. Do you know the smell of wet sand? Does it make you think of going down to the beach in the evening light after a rainy day and gathering the damp driftwood (it will dry on the top of the stove) and picking up for a moment the long branches of seaweed that the waves have tossed and listening to gulls who stand reflected in the gleaming sand, and just fly a little way off as you come and then—settle again?”

4

At Karori, her own country had lain “beyond the Blue Mountains.” When she returned to Tinakori Road, it lay beyond the Green Gate. She was always—all her life long—to have this escape—this country of her mind. For years it was the Heron, that perfect house beneath the flowery trees where I she would create her own world, live in the company of those radiant beings,“her people.” Nearer the end of her life when her disease had made her even more of an exile, it became “the silent world”; then “no one knew where she was” :

“… I have felt very often lately as though the silence had some meaning beyond these signs, these intimations. Isn't it possible that if one yielded there is a whole world into which one is received? It is so near and yet I am conscious that I hold back from giving myself up to it. What is this something mysterious that waits—that beckons?”

The Green Gate was far on this side of those borders; yet it was beyond the known land. Behind it were flowers, and enchantment. It was guarded (both she and Marion liked to believe) by a fiery page 142 dragon. Many times the two girls passed it as they flew up Hill Street to the Golder Hill house, where Kathleen was allowed to visit Marion Ruddick. Many times they crept to the Green Gate, longing yet fearing to open it; always something drew them back in time.

In the Golder Hill garden they sat in the acacia tree eating little fluted cakes of Canadian maple sugar brought by Marion from Canada. From their high leafy perch, they could look into the Convent square; they could even see the ripple across the grass, across the beds of freezias. Was it the wind shaking them, or were they heavy with bees? Kathleen was never in that garden more than once or twice; yet from the acacia tree she was at home in that square. They could see the Harbour from their high seat. On some rare days the water turned the colour of New Zealand jade—jade that the Maoris mined in the South Island. In 1915 her brother gave her a tiki ^* made of it, which she wore round her neck till she died.

Marion told stories of her own country:“sliding down snow-covered hills on sleds and driving in red sleighs with jingling bells through forests of living Christmas trees”; and she remembered, afterward, that:“Every tree in the Golder Hill garden contained a wood nymph and every flower a fairy. The big rata tree with its shaggy red blossoms we called ‘the fire tree’ and its flowers were burning tongues of flame.” They tried poetry, as they sat in the tree page break page break

Day's Bay

page 143 looking out over the Convent garden and the Harbour. Marion remembers their struggle with an Ode to a Snowdrop. They kept that kingdom to themselves.

There were other “moments, glimpses, even, before which all else pales.” Up through the wild bush at the back of Day's Bay were the “ferny paths” winding lazily through tree fern: umbrella fern with dark green leaves spreading out from the centre like a star fish; lace fern, aromatic in the hot sunshine; the real climbing fern, Mange-Mange, twisting over bushes and trees with its stem so uniform that the Maoris wove baskets from it, and used it as rope to fasten the thatch to their roofs. There was King Fern with little boat-shaped seeds; and Crown Fern with a perfect little crown in each section of stem.

Over the second range beyond the Bay was a beech grove—nothing but beeches over the whole hill top. The leaves were like lace—like dark brown lace. Light coming through them made another world, like the light beneath water. The girls walking in this wood were tempted to step very high (as they stepped to escape crabs in the rock pools at the Bay). To walk through this odd light was like walking through the clearest of rain water; the slim tree-trunks glistened whitely, like stems beneath water, too; small roots twining lacily over the bare ground were like roots washed bare at the bottom of the sea. Did they merely imagine that the bell bird sounded different here? That it was like a bell heard across lonely water?

In spring, the fern-like dark beech leaves with page 144 flaming Iceland poppies, and boronia—little tight bunches heaped in the huge baskets with daphne— were sold down on the corners of Lambton Quay.

People stood talking, gesturing with unwrapped flowers.

As she pinned boronia on her coat, Kathleen thought that nothing could bring the woods down into the city as that beech fern—as those minute bronze bells of boronia, splotched with their own sunlight and with a fragrance like none other on earth. On early mornings, when the flowers had just come heavy with scent from the Hutt Valley, she stood pressed against the windows of flower shops and “gazed into them as small boys are supposed to gaze into pastry-cooks.”

Nothing could so bring back New Zealand spring —(azalea bushes in the Botanical Garden, beds of cinerarias at Tinakori Road, or flower baskets on Lambton Quay)—as the heavy scent of boronia:

“I'd like to send you seeds from the far corners of the earth and have a boronia plant below the studio window. Do you know the scent of boronia? My grandmother and I were very fond of going to a place called McNab's Tea Gardens, and there we used to follow our noses and track down the boronia bushes. Oh, how I must have tired the darling out! It doesn't bear thinking about.”

In their own garden at No. 75 there were “glimpses,” too:

“‘I remember ruffling the violet leaves…. Do you remember that some of the pears we found used to have little teeth marks in them?’

“‘Who bit them?’

“‘It was always a mystery’.”

As, years later, at Hampstead, she had “moments” of that same faëriness intruding over the borders from another world:

“There is nobody in the house, and yet whose is this faint whispering? On the stairs there are tiny spots of gold—tiny foot-prints.”

The Green Gate hid the enchanted garden—for how long? Yet (as Marion remembers) the day came when they must know:

“Cautiously we pulled the latch and pushed it slowly open. There was our garden, a riot of colour, but there also was the dragon in the form of a gardener. With a roar of rage he advanced toward us with a rake in his hand, and we needed no second warning. We simply flew up the hill, not stopping once until we were in my mother's sitting-room, where cambric tea awaited us and thin slabs of bread and butter with many coloured ‘hundreds and thousands,’ so beloved of Kass and me.”

Kathleen was nearly twelve, then; her childhood was almost over. Her father was arranging to send the three girls to the more “exclusive” Terrace School on Fitzherbert Terrace. Marion was going to the South Island to a boarding school. Kathleen saw Marion for the last time at an exhibition, where she went with Gran and Marie to watch Marion dance a minuet with three other girls. Already she was conscious of the breaking away of things which had bound her—conscious of new tides rising in her. page 146 It was less than half realised; she only knew a certain strange stirring.

She said good-bye to Marion:“You lucky girl to be going away to school!”