cult,
impossible really, to go away so far from London and Lily.

Guy wrote to him several times, urging him to come and stay at Plashers
Mead. Finally he went there for a week-end; and Guy spent the whole time
rushing in and out of the house on the chance of meeting Pauline Grey,
the girl whom Michael had seen with him in the canoe last summer. Guy
explained the complications of his engagement to Pauline; how it seemed
he would soon have to choose between love and art; how restrictions were
continually being put upon their meeting each other; and how violently
difficult life was becoming here at Plashers Mead, where Michael had
prophesied such abundant ease. Michael was very sympathetic, and when he
met Pauline on a soft December morning, he did think she was beautiful
and very much like the wild rose that Guy had taken as the symbol of
her. She seemed such a fairy child that he could not imagine problems of
conduct in which she could be involved. Nevertheless, it was impossible
not to feel that over Plashers Mead brooded a sense of tragedy: and yet
it seemed ridiculous to compare Guy's difficulties with his own.

For Christmas Michael went down to Hardingham, where Stella and Alan had
by this time settled down in their fat country. He was delighted to see
how much the squire Alan was already become; and there was certainly
something very attractive in these two young people moving about that
grave Georgian house. The house itself was of red brick and stood at the
end of an avenue of oaks in a park of about two hundred acres. That it
could ever have not been there; that ever those lawns had been defaced
by builder's rubbish was now inconceivable. So too within, Michael could
not realize that anybody else but Stella and Alan had ever stood in this
drawing-room, looking out of the tall windows whose sills scarcely rose
above the level of the grass outside; that anyone else but Stella and
Alan had ever laughed in this solemn library with its pilasters and
calf-bound volumes and terrestrial globe; that anyone else but Stella
and Alan had ever sat at dinner under the eyes of those bag-wigged
squires, that long-nosed Light Dragoon, or that girl in her chip hat,
holding a bunch of cherries.

"No doubt you've got a keen scent for tradition," said Michael to
Stella. "But really you have been able to get into the manner
surprisingly fast. These cocker-spaniels, for instance, who follow you
both round, and the deerhound on the