llen in
love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.

"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard. "Walking down
the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning I saw two blue butterflies
on a wild rose, and they were like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like
her cheek."

"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.

Mark had had such a limited experience of the world that the amenities
of the society in which he found himself incorporated did not strike his
imagination as remarkable. It was in truth one of those eclectic,
somewhat exquisite, even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced
partly by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most of all,
it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The genius of Cotswolds
imparts to those who come beneath his influence the art of existing
appropriately in the houses that were built at his inspiration. They do
not boast of their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not
living up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their voices
lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind through willows and
aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales or the sea.

Mark accepted the manners of the society in which good fortune had set
him as the natural expression of an inward orderliness, a traditional
respect for beauty like the ritual of Christian worship. That the three
daughters of the Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who
failed to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike
him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment that any other
standard than theirs existed. He felt the same about people who objected
to Catholic ceremonies; their dislike of them did not present itself to
him as arising out of a different religious experience from his own; but
it appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as a kind of
wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He was indeed still at the
age when externals possess not so much an undue importance, but when
they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his
youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate
form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from
the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for
those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the
utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of
thos