Grosville received the remark with derision.

"You ask my wife what she thinks about French convents. She knows--she's
had lots of Catholic relations. She'll tell you tales."

Ashe thought, however, that he could trust himself to see that she did
nothing of the sort.

* * * * *

The smoking-room broke up late, but the new Under-secretary sat up still
later, reading and smoking in his bedroom. A box of Foreign Office
papers lay on his table. He went through them with a keen sense of
pleasure, enjoying his new work and his own competence to do it, of
which, notwithstanding his remarks to Mary Lyster, he was not really at
all in doubt. Then when his comments were done, and the papers replaced
in the order in which they would now go up to the Secretary of State, he
felt the spring night oppressively mild, and walking to the window, he
threw it wide open.

He looked out upon a Dutch garden, full of spring flowers in bloom. In
the midst was a small fountain, which murmured to itself through the
night. An orangery or conservatory, of a charming eighteenth-century
design, ran round the garden in a semicircle, its flat pilasters and
mouldings of yellow stone taking under the moonlight the color and the
delicacy of ivory. Beyond the terrace which bordered the garden, the
ground fell to a river, of which the reaches, now dazzling, now sombre,
now slipping secret under woods, and now silverly open to the gentle
slopes of the park, brought wildness and romance into a scene that had
else been tame. Beyond the river on a rising ground was a village church
with a spire. The formal garden, the Georgian conservatory, the park,
the river, the church--they breathed England and the traditional English
life. All that they implied, of custom and inheritance, of strength and
narrowness, of cramping prejudice and stubborn force, was very familiar
to Ashe, and on the whole very congenial. He was glad to be an
Englishman and a member of an English government. The ironic mood which
was tolerably constant in him did not in the least interfere with his
normal enjoyment of normal goods. He saw himself often as a shade among
shadows, as an actor among actors; but the play was good all the same.
That a man should know himself to be a fool was in his eyes, as it was
in Lord Melbourne's, the first of necessities. But fool or no fool, let
him find the occupations that suited him, and pursue them. On those
terms life was