‘The country does sound attractive,’ she conceded, turning eager eyes on Kingston. ‘And you talk of it as if you belonged there. But you don’t, of course.’ ‘No, but my dear mother has spent so many years pretending to that the pretence is second nature by now. Dear mother! it used to be the funniest thing in the world to see her playing at the Old Established Family. It was her great ambition, and she drilled my poor father day and night into acting the squire. By now I verily believe she has persuaded herself that we have been settled at Ivescar for half a dozen centuries at least. She goes about among the tenants with the most splendid air of having known them all, and all their families, since the days of Edward the Confessor. There’s nothing so genuine as a good imitation--except that the good imitation is generally too good, and overdoes itself.’ ‘Well,’ said Isabel, ‘you have fired me with a longing for the mountains and the caves and waterfalls. But what is the house itself like?’ At this point Gundred caught them up again. She had dropped out of the dialogue in a twinge of decorous annoyance at the cavalier way in which Isabel had ignored her opening on sport and shelved the conversation. ‘A very nice house, Kingston tells me,’ she put in. ‘Built about a hundred years ago. Very comfortable and convenient.’ ‘Ah, I know,’ interrupted Isabel. ‘That tells me everything. All of the best Early-Victorian Tudor. Everything solid and handsome and expensive, with a picture of your husband’s father in the hall, life-size, carrying a gun and a dead rabbit. I can imagine Ivescar--just a house--just a thing with doors and roofs and windows--simply a place to live in. Now, this, this’--she waved her hands comprehensively--‘this isn’t a place to live in. It’s a place that lives on people. Here it’s the people that are subordinate to the building. At Ivescar nobody cares about the house except for the people. The house only exists to keep their feet warm, and send them up their dinner all cosy and hot from the kitchen. Yes, Ivescar is a place to live in, and this is a place to die in. One can’t imagine one’s self dying in an ordinary house. Death is too big a thing to come under its nice squatty ceilings. One feels the whole thing would fly in flinders; Death would lift the roof off, and burst the walls, if he came in. He is so large. But one could die here, and the setting would not be a bit mean or unsuited to the drama. Any nice, carpety, cushiony building does to live in; one wants a really-truly house to die in--a place where one can receive the Great Visitor without feeling cramped or undignified or cheap. Imagine dying in a chintz bedroom, with enamelled tin baths and foot-pans and hot-water cans.’ ‘Lots of people do,’ protested Kingston. ‘I suppose they have the Elizabethan feeling that the play is more important than its setting.’