t were a smile, upon it. And it happened that this accident of his
dream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain design
he {169} then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the
story of his spirit--in that process of brain-building by which we are,
each one of us, what we are. With the image of the place so clear and
favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and how
his thoughts had grown up to him. In that half-spiritualised house he
could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul
which had come to be there--of which indeed, through the law which
makes the material objects about them so large an element in children's
lives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward being woven
through and through each other into one inextricable texture--half,
tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood
and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows
how far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw a child moving,
and could divide the main streams at least of the winds that had played
on him, and study so the first stage in that mental journey.

The _old house_, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always
called it (as all children do, who can recollect a change of home, soon
enough but not too soon to mark a period in their lives) really was an
old house; and an element of French descent in its inmates--descent
from Watteau, the old court-painter, one of whose gallant pieces still
hung in one of the rooms--might explain, together with some other
things, a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about everything
there--the curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls with which the
light and shadow played so delicately; might explain also the tolerance
of the great poplar in the garden, a tree {170} most often despised by
English people, but which French people love, having observed a certain
fresh way its leaves have of dealing with the wind, making it sound, in
never so slight a stirring of the air, like running water.

The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up the
staircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way up
at a broad window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and the
blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late April, against
the blue, below which the perfumed juice of the find of fallen fruit in
autumn was so fresh. At the next tu