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bad memory for names, and it irritated her not to be able
to think of them, so that she would pause in the middle of
some story to rack her brains. Sometimes she had to give it
up, but it often occurred to her afterwards, and when Philip
was talking of something she would interrupt him.
‘Collins, that was it. I knew it would come back to me
some time. Collins, that’s the name I couldn’t remember.’
It exasperated him because it showed that she was not
listening to anything he said, and yet, if he was silent, she
reproached him for sulkiness. Her mind was of an order
that could not deal for five minutes with the abstract, and
when Philip gave way to his taste for generalising she very
quickly showed that she was bored. Mildred dreamt a great
deal, and she had an accurate memory for her dreams,
which she would relate every day with prolixity.
One morning he received a long letter from Thorpe
Athelny. He was taking his holiday in the theatrical way, in
which there was much sound sense, which characterised
him. He had done the same thing for ten years. He took
his whole family to a hop-field in Kent, not far from Mrs.
Athelny’s home, and they spent three weeks hopping. It
kept them in the open air, earned them money, much to
Mrs. Athelny’s satisfaction, and renewed their contact with
mother earth. It was upon this that Athelny laid stress. The
sojourn in the fields gave them a new strength; it was like a
magic ceremony, by which they renewed their youth and the
power of their limbs and the sweetness of the spirit: Philip
had heard him say many fantastic, rhetorical, and pictur-
esque things on the subject. Now Athelny invited him to