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But if he tries to make me answer him too soon I shall say No, Waggin, and there will be an end of it!" "Marcia dearest! don't be cruel to him!" "No but he mustn't press me! I've given him hints and he won't take them. I can't make up my mind, Waggin. I can't! It's not only marrying him it's the relations. Yesterday a girl I know described a week-end to me at Hoddon Grey.
Reservation had been permitted for years in the Hoddon Grey chapel, and the fact had interwoven itself with the deepest life of the household, eclipsing and dulling the other religious practices of Anglicanism, just as the strong plant in a hedgerow drives out or sterilizes the rest.
Sir Wilfrid had just thrown himself back in his chair, looking round him with a sigh of satisfaction. "Hoddon Grey makes me feel good! Not a common effect of country-houses!" "Enjoy them while you may!" laughed Sir Louis Ford. "Glenwilliam is after them." "Glenwilliam!" exclaimed the Dean. "I saw him at the station, with his handsome but rather strange-looking daughter. What's he doing here?"
But at Hoddon Grey, even in the most intimate and beautiful moments of the first love scenes between herself and Newbury, she had seemed to be entering upon moving in a world where almost nothing was left free for her to judge; where what she thought mattered very little, because it was taken for granted that she would ultimately think as Hoddon Grey thought; would be cherished, indeed, as the latest and dearest captive of the Hoddon Grey system and the Hoddon Grey beliefs.
She walked slowly through the guestrooms on the garden front, looking at everything with a critical eye. The furniture of the rooms was shabby and plain. It had been scarcely changed at all since 1832, when Lord William's widowed mother had come to live at Hoddon Grey. But everything smelt of lavender and much cleaning.
Sir Wilfrid Bury, who was a hearty eater, was accustomed to say of the Hoddon Grey fare that it deprived the Hoddon Grey fasts which were kept according to the strict laws of the Church of any merit whatever. It left you nothing to give up. Nevertheless, this little morning scene at Hoddon Grey possessed, for the sensitive eye, a peculiar charm.
But she never wavered for one moment as to her determination to see Enid Glenwilliam after the Martover meeting; nor did the question of Arthur's personal happiness enter for one moment into her calculations. The breakfast gong had just sounded at Hoddon Grey. The hour was a quarter to nine.
"A God suffers and bleeds, for that! No! for us, if there is a God, He speaks in love in love only in love supremely such love as those two poor things had for each other!" After which they walked along in silence for some time. Each had said the last word of his own creed. Presently they reached a footpath from which the house at Hoddon Grey could be reached. Newbury paused.
But to Lord William Newbury the house of Hoddon Grey stood as the symbol of a spiritual campaign in which his forebears, himself, and his son were all equally enrolled the endless, unrelenting campaign of the Church against the world, the Christian against the unbeliever. ... His wife broke in upon his reverie. "Are you going to say anything about Lord Coryston's letter, William?"
An hour later the drawing-room and the lawns of Hoddon Grey were alive with tea and talk. Lady Coryston, superbly tall, in trailing black, was strolling with Lord William.
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