"If I hear him doing that," said Bunting, "I shall tell him what I _really_ think of him." CHAPTER VIII WHITSUNTIDE Whitsuntide, which fell in June that year, found a large party assembled at the Abbey. Grafton had brought down a few friends every Friday since Easter, but this was the first time that the house had been full. He had enjoyed those week-ends at Abington more consciously than he had enjoyed anything for years. And yet there was 'nothing to do,' as he was careful to inform everybody whom he asked down. He would have hesitated himself, before he had bought Abington, over spending two and sometimes three and four days in the week in a country house, in late spring and early summer, with no very good golf links near, no river or sea, nothing, specially interesting in the way of guests, or elaborate in the preparations made to entertain them. While the children had been growing up he had paid occasional visits to quiet country houses, in this way, and since Caroline had left the schoolroom they had sometimes paid them together. But once or twice in the year, outside the shooting season, had been quite enough. There were more amusing things to be done, and he had been so accustomed to skimming the cream off every social pleasure that he had always been on the lookout for amusing things to be done, though he had not cared for them when he did them much more than he enjoyed other parts of his easy life. It was all too much on the same level. Special enjoyment only comes by contrast. Grafton's work interested him, and he did not do enough of it ever to make him want a holiday for the sake of a holiday, and seldom enough on any given day to make him particularly glad to leave it and go home. He liked leaving it, to go home or to his club for a rubber. But then he also rather liked leaving his home to go down to the City, in the mornings. When he had been to the City for four or five days running, he liked to wake up and feel he was not going there. If he had been away for some time, he was pleased to go back to it, though perhaps he would have been equally pleased to do something else, as long as it was quite different from what he had been doing. He liked dining out; he also liked dining at home. If he had dined alone with his family two or three times running, he liked having guests; if he had dined in company four or five times running, he preferred to dine alone with his family. It was the same all through. The tune to which his life was played was change: constant little variations of the same sort of tune. He would never have said that he was not satisfied with it; it was the life he would have chosen to go back to at any time, if he had been cut off from it, and there was indeed no other kind of life that he could not have had if he had chosen to change it. But it held no great zest. The little changes were too frequent, and had become in course of time no more than a series of crepitations in a course of essential sameness.