ming breast and _rooketty-cooing_ in the sun. Large, clear drops
fell slowly from the spout of a wooden pump, and splashed upon a flat
stone. The place seemed to enfold the stillness. There was a sense of
inclusion and peace.

There is a distinct pleasure to the eye in a quiet brick court where
everything is fresh and prim; in sunny weather you can lounge in a room
and watch it through an open door, in a kind of lazy dream. The boy,
standing at the window above to let the fresh air blow round his neck,
was alive to that pleasure; he was intensely conscious of the pigeon
swelling in its bravery, of the clean yard, the dripping pump, and the
great stillness. His father on the step beneath had a different pleasure
in the sight. The fresh indolence of morning was round him too, but it
was more than that that kept him gazing in idle happiness. He was
delighting in the sense of his own property around him, the most
substantial pleasure possible to man. His feeling, deep though it was,
was quite vague and inarticulate. If you had asked Gourlay what he was
thinking of he could not have told you, even if he had been willing to
answer you civilly--which is most unlikely. Yet his whole being,
physical and mental (physical, indeed, rather than mental), was
surcharged with the feeling that the fine buildings around him were his,
that he had won them by his own effort, and built them large and
significant before the world. He was lapped in the thought of it.

All men are suffused with that quiet pride in looking at the houses and
lands which they have won by their endeavours--in looking at the houses
more than at the lands, for the house which a man has built seems to
express his character and stand for him before the world, as a sign of
his success. It is more personal than cold acres, stamped with an
individuality. All men know that soothing pride in the contemplation of
their own property. But in Gourlay's sense of property there was another
element--an element peculiar to itself, which endowed it with its
warmest glow. Conscious always that he was at a disadvantage among his
cleverer neighbours, who could achieve a civic eminence denied to him,
he felt nevertheless that there was one means, a material means, by
which he could hold his own and reassert himself--by the bravery of his
business, namely, and all the appointments thereof, among which his
dwelling was the chief. That was why he had spent so much money on the
house. Tha