a Mandarin,
but the one would be as unnatural and unattractive an enterprise as
the other. He came to be upon nodding terms with most of the
"carriage-people" round about; some few he exchanged meaningless words
with upon occasion, and understood that his wife also talked with, when
it was unavoidable, but there his relationship to the County ended,
and he was well pleased that it should be so. It gave him a deep
satisfaction to see that his wife seemed also well pleased.

He used the word "seemed" in his inmost musings, for it was never quite
certain what really did please and displease her. It was always puzzling
to him to reconcile her undoubted intellectual activity with the
practical emptiness of the existence she professed to enjoy. In one
direction, she had indeed a genuine outlet for her energies, which he
could understand her regarding in the light of an occupation. She was
crazier about flowers and plants than anybody he had ever heard of,
and it had delighted him to make over to her, labelled jocosely as the
bouquet-fund, a sum of money which, it seemed to him, might have paid
for the hanging-gardens of Babylon. It yielded in time--emerging slowly
but steadily from a prodigious litter of cement and bricks and mortar
and putty, under the hands of innumerable masons, carpenters, glaziers,
plumbers, and nondescript subordinates, all of whom talked unwearyingly
about nothing at all, and suffered no man to perform any part of his
allotted task without suspending their own labours to watch him--an
imposing long line of new greenhouses, more than twenty in number. The
mail-bag was filled meanwhile with nurserymen's catalogues, and the cart
made incessant journeys to and from Punsey station, bringing back vast
straw-enwrapped baskets and bundles and boxes beyond counting, the
arrival and unpacking of which was with Edith the event of the day.
About the reality of her engrossed interest in all the stages of
progress by which these greenhouses became crowded museums of the
unusual and abnormal in plant-life, it was impossible to have any
suspicion. And even after they were filled to overflowing, Thorpe noted
with joy that this interest seemed in no wise to flag. She spent hours
every day under the glass, exchanging comments and theories with her
gardeners, and even pulling things about with her own hands, and other
hours she devoted almost as regularly to supervising the wholesale
alterations that had been begun in th