and sentiments with
practical good business, without letting one interfere with the other.
It's none of it bad business this, as the estate is entailed, and the
boy is Rosy's. It's good business."

This was what Betty had written to her father in New York from Stornham
Court.

"The things I am beginning to do, it would be impossible for me to
resist doing, and it would certainly be impossible for you. The thing I
am seeing I have never seen, at close hand, before, though I have taken
in something almost its parallel as part of certain picturesqueness of
scenes in other countries. But I am LIVING with this and also, through
relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to it, and it belongs
to me. You and I may have often seen in American villages crudeness,
incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the composition of a picture,
a rough ugliness the result of haste and unsettled life which stays
nowhere long, but packs up its goods and chattels and wanders farther
afield in search of something better or worse, in any case in search
of change, but we have never seen ripe, gradual falling to ruin of what
generations ago was beautiful. To me it is wonderful and tragic and
touching. If you could see the Court, if you could see the village,
if you could see the church, if you could see the people, all quietly
disintegrating, and so dearly perfect in their way that if one knew
absolutely that nothing could be done to save them, one could only stand
still and catch one's breath and burst into tears. The church has stood
since the Conquest, and, as it still stands, grey and fine, with its
mass of square tower, and despite the state of its roof, is not yet
given wholly to the winds and weather, it will, no doubt, stand a few
centuries longer. The Court, however, cannot long remain a possible
habitation, if it is not given a new lease of life. I do not mean that
it will crumble to-morrow, or the day after, but we should not think
it habitable now, even while we should admit that nothing could be more
delightful to look at. The cottages in the village are already, many of
them, amazing, when regarded as the dwellings of human beings. How long
ago the cottagers gave up expecting that anything in particular would be
done for them, I do not know. I am impressed by the fact that they are
an unexpecting people. Their calm non-expectancy fills me with interest.
Only centuries of waiting for their superiors in rank to do things
for them, and