She admires his treasure, her eyes limpid and sweet with saints and angels, and thinks, ’Why, if I stopped praising the very stones here would cry out,’ and so they both take a deep interest in the moulding for quite different reasons. It’s the same with meals. He’s always late—she’s always patient. She doesn’t try to be, she _is_. He’ll come in half an hour after the time for luncheon. ’Constance, I’m so sorry, I’m afraid I’m late, I hope you haven’t waited. I found such a fascinating bit of Norman work in that church.’ She knows he doesn’t mean to be discourteous, but that he’s got simply no idea of time, while she is always thinking of eternity, so she says gently, ’It doesn’t matter, Jasper, if you hurry now, dear. I always prefer to wait.’ She is such a stately beauty, such a very great lady. She makes all the other women feel their gloves are shabby. Her white hair shines so that I always think it’s ’glistering,’ and her nose is quite straight, the kind you see in a cathedral on a stone archbishop, and her clothes are ’scrummy,’ so _really_ beautiful that you hardly realise them. They are part of her, and she harmonises with the background. Her tweeds are just the heather she walks about in, and at night it’s only her lovely old lace that shows you where her neck leaves off and her shimmering cream satin gown begins. Uncle Jasper worships the ground she walks on, while for her, ’Jasper’ comes just after God. But although my uncle thinks her so adorable, he can’t keep even his compliments quite free of his ruling passion. ’Constance,’ he said one day, ’you _are_ beautiful, why, you’ve got mediæval ears!’ And ’Constance’ blushed at that because, coming from him, it was a most tremendous compliment, and she was secretly rather glad, I expect, that when ears were doled round she got a pair with the lobes left out. Funny old Uncle Jasper! But though— ’For him delicious flavours dwell In Books, as in old muscatel,’ he’s quite a decent landlord. There are no leaky roofs on his estate. Daddy says it’s because of his feudal mind. I don’t know if that is why the whole village seems like a family. We are interested in all the cottage folk, and they in us, just as our fathers were before us. Uncle Jasper looks after their material interests and Daddy saves their souls; Ross bosses all the boys, and I cuddle the babies, while Aunt Constance is like that lady in E. B. Browning’s poem, whose goodness was that nice, invisible sort. She too ’Never found fault with you, never implied Your wrong by her right, and yet men at her side Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town The children were gladder that pulled at her gown.’