The Morning Gift

I was so excited to find that your dear nephew was on our staff and he may perhaps have mentioned that Verena, our only daughter, is taking his course. She is quite enchanted with his scholarship and expertise and at dinner recently they had a most engrossing conversation which was, I fear, quite above my head. You will, however, be wondering what emboldens me to write to you after so many years away in India and I will be entirely frank. As you know, dear Quinton runs a field course for our students at Bowmont. To this course Verena, as one of his Honours students, will, of course, be required to go and indeed she is looking forward to it greatly. However her position here at Thameside is delicate, as I know you will understand. She herself insists on being treated like all the other students as regards examinations and academic standards and there is certainly no difficulty there, for she is very clever. But socially, of course, she leads a different life, and we are careful not to encourage her classmates to take her presence at university functions for granted. Without some sense in which the Vice Chancellor and his family are different from ordinary academics, both staff and students, there could be no authority and no stability. This is something I need not explain to you.

So I am understandably anxious at the idea that Verena should share a dormitory with the other pupils. I gather that everyone ‘mucks in’ and sleeps in bunk beds and that there is no attempt to enforce any kind of discipline and though the students are, of course, the salt of the earth, some of them come from backgrounds which would, I think, make them uncomfortable if Verena was among them. Would it therefore be very impertinent of me to ask if my daughter could stay with you for the duration of the course? I understand that your nephew has his own rooms in the tower and that you are responsible for the domestic arrangements so that he would not need to concern himself with Verena unless he wished to do so. I myself shall be visiting the north at this time, and as Verena’s twenty-fourth birthday happens to fall on the last Friday of the course, I might perhaps invite myself just for that day before going on to make contact with dear Lord Hartington and the many other friends and connections of my own familywhich, after our long absence in India, I long to see again.