"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.
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