Gita warmed to him for a moment. “If I’ve got to be introduced to this Eastern Society I’ve got to, I suppose, but I shall live here and only go to New York occasionally. And I’ll not be invited to parties because I don’t dance. I don’t fancy I’ll be run after for dinners either. I wish I were rich enough to have an apartment in town to spend half the week in. I do want to go to the opera and all the new plays. But my lawyer says I must be careful for a year or two.” “Why don’t you rent the manor? I fancy there are a good many of the backgroundless on the lookout for an incongruous setting. They would give you a fancy price.” Gita shook her head vigorously. “I did think of it once but I never could do it now. It’s too much mine in too many ways. It seems to have a soul of its own, a distillation of all the Carterets, perhaps. I could as easily have rented out my grandmother.” Bylant laughed heartily. He had a mellow laugh and it struck no false note in the wood. “I have heard a good deal of Mrs. Carteret and I fancy your old manor house would appreciate the compliment. I understand exactly what you mean, for I too have an old house—in Albany—and my mother would not live anywhere else. She insisted that old houses, particularly old family mansions, had a very real and complex personality, made up not only of those who had lived there—the direct inheritors and the diverse strains introduced by marriage—but because the windows, she said, were so many eyes looking out on history in the process of making; the family ghost, perhaps, recording it all in the invisible volumes that atmosphere shares with the subconsciousness of man. An old house must have an atmospheric library as extensive as the British Museum, and could hardly fail to have a personality. My mother—Bladina, I called her, for, although she was the consummate mother, she seemed little older than myself—used to say that if anything could convert her to spiritualism it would be the hope of making her old walls speak; the house was built by a Dutch ancestor when Albany was Fort Orange and she refused to leave it when she married.”