made
the young man say to himself with a quick, thin sigh, "This time I _am_
in for it!" And he immediately had the unpolitical sense again that
there was nothing so pleasant as the way the quiet bachelor house had
its best rooms on the big garden, which seemed to advance into them
through their wide windows and ruralise their dulness.

"I expect it will be a lateish eight, sir," said Mr. Chayter,
superintending in the library the production of tea on a large scale.
Everything at Mr. Carteret's seemed to Nick on a larger scale than
anywhere else--the tea-cups, the knives and forks, the door-handles, the
chair-backs, the legs of mutton, the candles, and the lumps of coal:
they represented and apparently exhausted the master's sense of pleasing
effect, for the house was not otherwise decorated. Nick thought it
really hideous, but he was capable at any time of extracting a degree of
amusement from anything strongly characteristic, and Mr. Carteret's
interior expressed a whole view of life. Our young man was generous
enough to find in it a hundred instructive intimations even while it
came over him--as it always did at Beauclere--that this was the view he
himself was expected to take. Nowhere were the boiled eggs at breakfast
so big or in such big receptacles; his own shoes, arranged in his room,
looked to him vaster there than at home. He went out into the garden and
remembered what enormous strawberries they should have for dinner. In
the house was a great deal of Landseer, of oilcloth, of woodwork painted
and "grained."

Finding there would be time before the evening meal or before Mr.
Carteret was likely to see him he quitted the house and took a stroll
toward the abbey. It covered acres of ground on the summit of the hill,
and there were aspects in which its vast bulk reminded him of the ark
left high and dry upon Ararat. It was the image at least of a great
wreck, of the indestructible vessel of a faith, washed up there by a
storm centuries before. The injury of time added to this appearance--the
infirmities round which, as he knew, the battle of restoration had begun
to be fought. The cry had been raised to save the splendid pile, and the
counter-cry by the purists, the sentimentalists, whatever they were, to
save it from being saved. They were all exchanging compliments in the
morning papers.

Nick sauntered about the church--it took a good while; he leaned against
low things and looked up at it while he smoked