The ordinary work-a-day person with limited money and limited leisure
has no idea of the extraordinary difficulties that confront people with
unlimited quantities of both. This matter of choosing a house, for
instance. When you have just so much money to spend and so much time to
look round in, the chances are that you solve your housing problem quite
expeditiously. Far different is the troubled lot of those whose bank
balance is no curb upon the gratification of every whim. They climb to
the top of high hills and wonder how a house would look from here, or
from there, and whether it would be better to have it facing the sun or
the prevailing winds or the river tumbling in the valley below. Then
there are abstruse problems about garages and gardens and conservatories
and electric light and drains and so on. Finally, there is the question
of architecture. Is it to be English or classic--the Elizabethan gable
or the slim Ionic pediment? ... It is all a very lengthy business, as
you can well imagine.
On that second excursion to Hindhead Helen quite made up her mind that
no vacant house in the district was at all suitable, and that,
therefore, one would have to be built. And this, of course, meant
continuing the search for a site. The site was found, if I remember
rightly, on the occasion of her fourth visit, but details of aspect,
location, and so on, were not settled till the ninth visit, when an
architect and surveyor was in attendance.
It must have been an idyllic quest, during those long lovely days of May
and June. At first the two of them walked, but walking takes up a lot of
time, and besides, as June had said, Helen hated walking. So one day she
came down in the big Daimler car, sent the chauffeur back by train,
and taught Terry to drive. She couldn't drive herself, but she knew just
enough about it to teach him, and he proved such an apt pupil that he
drove her safely back to town that very night. And then the next time
that the house business demanded her presence at Hindhead he called for
her at the End House and there was no need of a chauffeur.
The whole thing was so frank and open and, above all, so sweetly
plausible that there was no chance, even if there had been any reason,
to tender warning advice. Fate, like a warm sun at noonday, was blazing
down on them from a cloudless sky. Terry couldn't even wonder if her
days in the country were unfair to Severn, for it was on his behalf that
she was taking them. Severn, it appeared, was keen about the new house,
and Helen wasn't so especially, even after Terry's strenuous efforts to
make her. And how charming, how subtly reassuring was her resistance to
those efforts!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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