Free Pure Juliet by Stella Gibbons

sixteen.
    Gradually, but surely, a love for the huge Earth and a longing and intention to devote himself to its welfare – and rescue – had replaced the mood of the knight palely loitering. (It will have been noted that Frank was a confirmed quoter, perhaps because his feelings were stronger than his capacity to express them.)
    A mild conversation about the repairing of clocks and watches in the neighbourhood had begun. Antonio was sliding crystal plates, laden with something Portuguese and creamy, before each guest.
    How nearly Frank had lost his freedom for ever! Three years ago, that pale red hair and siren’s mouth had so enthralled him that he had proposed marriage. The greedy girl had accepted him, as a man rich enough and besotted enough to give her all the rubbish she wanted.
    There had followed eighteen trial months, in which they tore one another to pieces.
    He knew that most people would have said that he was the one who should give way – Ottolie’s desires for a smart modern house, gadgets, a very large car, foreign travel, and four dinner parties a week were all natural; it was he, loving simplicity, solitude, silence and the company of one beloved other, who was the crank.
    To be fair to her, she had tried. But in arguing with her, he had felt that she looked on him as actually mentally ailing. Who but one so afflicted could prefer a bunch of weeds to a great ‘arrangement’ of roses at one-fifty each?
    He had been living, at the time of their affair, in a cottage rented from his friend Edmund Spencer, the poet, and – his reverie again remorsefully acknowledged it – Ottolie had praised the light given by the oil lamp, admired the clustersof wild roses in summer and what she called ‘but-they’re-only-leaves’ in winter, even played at simple-life housekeeping.
    But it had been hopeless.
    There was nothing to do (she had said) in the evenings, but talk or read; and she had been a reader only of books dealing with some resurrected political or sexual scandal. Wonder she never experienced; mystery, in the true sense, passed her by. Personalities and money were the only things that interested her. At the end of the eighteen months he had told her, with agonising regret for the beauty and the false fairy spell he was discarding, that they must part.
    Their first night absent from one another he had spent in tears; for his loss and for the waste, the bitter waste.
    Ottolie, who was twenty-two and feeling that hols had started after a term of some sixteen years, gave a party that same night long remembered in the neighbourhood with pursed lips and waggings of the head.
    What came to Frank’s rescue was the simplest and humblest of growths on earth: grass. He had taken a degree in botany in his early twenties, and had kept up, in a casual way, his reading of journals devoted to that subject and to ecology; he grew gradually more interested in the questions relating to the cultivation of wild-growing grasses for food, and finally, chancing in a small seaside town in Essex upon a society of amateur enthusiasts calling itself the Association for the Investigation of Edible Grasses, he joined it, put some thousands of his money into housing it, engaged a small, well-paid, dedicated staff, established himself firmly as adviser and supplier of cash – and found that grass had purged the poison from his spirit.
    ‘Like a dog or a cat,’ he said to Edmund Spencer. ‘I was ill, and I needed grass.’
    Now the AIEG’s membership was global, and rising into its second hundred thousand.
    Poor Clemence , Mrs Massey would sometimes think. First airy-fairy Ottolies, and now grass. Who but Frank Pennecuick could present such a combination of rivals?
    But he was very comfortably off, and one day soon he would inherit his great-aunt’s fortune. He would do very nicely for dearest Clem, who would of course cure him of all that grass nonsense and make him live in a proper way, when once they were married. Mrs Massey