The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by
high hedges and trees from what seemed to be a public
road beyond, were fairly spacious, but the sleek decorum
of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was scarcely
interesting. He liked better to study the house itself,
which in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal
of what a historic English country-house of the minor
class should be.
There had been a period in his youth when architecture
had attracted him greatly as offering a congenial and
lucrative career. Not much remained to him now of the
classifications and phraseology which he had gone to the trouble
of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked
at buildings with a kind of professional consciousness.
Hadlow House said intelligible things to him, and he
was pleased with himself for understanding them.
It was not new in any part, apparently, but there was
nothing pretentious in its antiquity. It had never
been a castle, or a fortified residence. No violent
alteration in habits or needs distinguished its present
occupants from its original builders. It had been
planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some
not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle
people to have homes, without fighting to defend them.
One could fancy that its calm and infinitely comfortable
history had never been ruffled from that day to this.
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