It struck
us then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the three of
us standing on the terrace that looked westward, surveying the
sky-reflecting windows of the house, and a feeling of unwarrantable
intrusion comes back to me.
Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still and
gracious place, whose age-long seclusion was only effectively broken
with the toot of the coming of the motor-car. An old Catholic family
had died out in it, century by century, and was now altogether
dead. Portions of the fabric are thirteenth century, and its last
architectural revision was Tudor; within, it is for the most part dark
and chilly, save for two or three favoured rooms and its tall-windowed,
oak-galleried hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature; a very wide,
broad lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there is
a great cedar in one corner under whose level branches one looks out
across the blue distances of the Weald, blue distances that are made
extraordinarily Italian in quality by virtue of the dark masses of that
single tree.
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