A beautiful peace, it was, to
wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in his
grey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned glasses, short,
thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening
this calm.
He began with a wave of his arm. "That's the place, George," he said.
"See?"
"Eh!" I cried--for I had been thinking of remote things.
"I got it."
"Got what?"
"For a house!--a Twentieth Century house! That's the place for it!"
One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him.
"Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!" he said. "Eh? Four-square
to the winds of heaven!"
"You'll get the winds up here," I said.
"A mammoth house it ought to be, George--to suit these hills."
"Quite," I said.
"Great galleries and things--running out there and there--See? I been
thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way--across the Weald. With
its back to Lady Grove."
"And the morning sun in its eye."
"Like an eagle, George,--like an eagle!"
So he broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation of
his culminating years, Crest Hill.
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