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Delaport Green was coming forth on the terrace, preceded by these words in her clear staccato voice. "Do you think," said Rose very gently to Edmund, "that we might go down into the wood?" Presently Molly fell behind Lady Groombridge and Mrs. Delaport Green as they walked along the terrace, and leant on the wall and looked at the view by herself.
For Easter there were the happiest prospects, as she and Molly had been invited to stay at a delightful house "far from the madding crowd" Groombridge Castle with a group of dear friends. Molly, knowing that "dear friends" with her hostess meant new and most desirable acquaintances, bought hats adorned with spring flowers and garments appropriate to the season with great satisfaction.
In one minute Groombridge Eighteen-thirty could go from here to Hong-Kong." "Then damn Groombridge Eighteen-thirty!" It was uttered in the bated tone that night enforces: but it came with a groan. The old gentleman faced round in amazement. "He means, sir," explained the woman, who had grown to understand Adam passing well, "my man means that it's all too big for us.
"Lady Groombridge doesn't frame well here, does she?" he said, smiling. "Rather a shock at that date the tweed skirt and the nailed boots and the felt hat." "Yes; but Lady Rose floats down between the hedges as if she had a long train, only she hasn't," laughed Molly. "The hem of her garment never touches the earth, as a matter of fact. I wonder how it is done."
It was impossible to be at Groombridge and not to feel the great and noble opportunities its possession must give any remarkable man; and the man who could give up such opportunities must be a very remarkable man indeed. In Molly's self-engrossed life it had something of the same effect as a great thunderstorm among mountains would have had in the physical order.
He hurled figures at them, heaping millions on millions. "See here" and, turning the telescope on its pivot, he sighted it carefully. "Look at that small star in the Great Bear: that's Groombridge Eighteen-thirty. He's two hundred billions of miles away. He travels two hundred miles a second, does Groombridge Eighteen-thirty.
It added to the sense of intoxication that often possessed her now. "Be drunken," says Baudelaire, "be drunken with wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you will, only be drunken." It was not the half-shrinking, half-defiant Molly Edmund had talked to in the woods of Groombridge, whom he watched now. That Molly was gone, and he regretted her.
Among indefinite possible orbits, one sought the orbit which would best satisfy the observed movement of the runaway star Groombridge, 1838, commonly called Henry Adams. As term of a nineteenth-century education, one sought a common factor for certain definite historical fractions. Any schoolboy could work out the problem if he were given the right to state it in his own terms.
Those in the first carriage were too familiar with Groombridge and its history and the others were too ignorant of both to have much to say. Edmund Grosse gave expression to Rose's thought at the sight of the familiar towers when he said: "Poor old Groombridge! it is hard not to have a son or even a nephew to leave it all to." "He likes the cousin very much," said Rose.
Delaport Green might be outside the circle in which Lady Groombridge disported herself with more dignity than gaiety, but she had the entrée to some houses almost as good, if not as exclusive, and she had also a large number of acquaintances who entertained systematically and extravagantly.
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