At the outset of his proprietorship he had bound himself,
as by a point of honour, to regard this as the finest
view from any gentleman's house in England. During the
first few months his fidelity had been taxed a good deal,
but these temptations and struggles lay now all happily
behind him. He had satisfactorily assimilated the spirit
of the vista, and blended it with his own. Its inertia,
when one came to comprehend it, was undeniably magnificent,
and long ago he had perceived within himself the growth
of an answering repose, a responsive lethargy, which in
its full development was also going to be very fine.
Practically all the land this side of the impalpable
line where trees and houses began to fade into the
background belonged to him; there were whole villages
nestling half-concealed under its shrubberies which were
his property. As an investment, these possessions
were extremely unremunerative. Indeed, if one added
the cost of the improvements which ought to be made,
to the expenditure already laid out in renovations,
it was questionable if for the next twenty years they
would not represent a deficit on the income-sheet. But,
now that he had laid hold of the local character,
it pleased him that it should be so. He would not for
the world have his gentle, woolly-minded, unprofitable
cottagers transformed into "hustlers"; it would wound
his eye to see the smoke of any commercial chimney,
the smudge of any dividend-paying factory, staining the pure
tints of the sylvan landscape.
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