flashes, by imagery, scene after scene flitting before him out of
the last forty-eight hours. Homespun virtues: unselfishness,
indifference to money values, the constant sense of filial,
fraternal, social responsibility . . . the glow in Jack's eyes
when they rested on his wife: Verney's war on cesspools: Leverton
Morley as scoutmaster: the Chinese lecture: rosebushes in the
churchyard, by the great stone cross with its list of names
beginning "George Potts, Wiltshire Rifles, aged 49," and ending
"Robert Denis Bendish, Grenadier Guards, aged 19: Into Thy Hands,
O Lord": old, old feudal England, closeknit, no pastoral of easy
virtues, yet holding together in a fellowship which underlies
class disunion: whose sons, from days long before the Conquest,
have always desired to go to sea when the cuckoo sang, and to
come home again when they were tired of the hail and salt
showers, because they could not bear to be landless and lordless
men. . . .

[Footnote]

"Swylce geac mona geomran reorde, singe sumeres
weard, sorge beade bittre in breosthord; pset se
beorn ne wat, secg esteadig, hwset pa sume dreoga,
pe pa wrseclastas widost lecga! . . . . pince him
on mode pset he his monndryhten clyppe and cysse
andon cneo lecge honda and heafod; ponne onwsecne,
gesihp him beforan fealwe wegas, bapian brimfuglas."

"Even so the cuckoo warns him with its sad voice,
Summer's warden sings foreboding sorrow, bitter grief
of heart. Little knows the prosperous fellow what
others are doing who follow far and wide the tracks
of exile . . . Then dreams the seafarer that he clasps
his lord and kisses him, and on his knee lays hand and
head; but he awakes and sees before him the fallow
waterways and the sea-fowls bathing."

[End of Footnote]

Lawrence flung off the impression with a jerk of his shoulders,
as if it were a physical weight. It was too heavy to be endured.
Not even to marry Isabel was he going to impose on his own
unbroken egoism the restricting code of a country village.

"You are a dreamer, Val! Why don't you throw over Bernard and
take the Etchingham agency? Yes, I heard every word you said to
Laura: you made a gallant effort, but the facts speak for
themselves, and your terminological inexactitudes wouldn't
deceive a babe at the breast. Bernard pays you 300 pounds a year
and orders you about like a groom, Grautchester would give you
six