But the evening post brought him a letter from the architect’s head clerk, saying that Mr ——­ was ill, had not been to the office for the last three or four days, and would not be able to go down to Sussex again before the end of the month.  Very much annoyed, John spent the evening thinking whom he could consult on the practicability of his last design for the front, and next, morning he was surprised at not seeing Kitty at breakfast.

“Where is Kitty?” he asked abruptly.

“She is not feeling well; she has a headache, and will not be down to-day.”

At the end of a long silence, John said: 

“I think I will go into Brighton....  I must really see an architect.”

“Oh, John, dear, you are not really determined to pull the house down?”

“There is no use, mother dear, in our discussing that subject; each and all of us must do the best we can with life.  And the best we can do is to try and gain heaven.”

“Breaking your mother’s heart, and making yourself ridiculous before the whole county, is not the way to gain heaven.”

“Oh, if you are going to talk like that....”

John went into the drawing-room to continue his reading, but the Latin bored him even more than it had done yesterday.  He took up the novel, but its enchantment was gone, and it appeared to him in its tawdry, original vulgarity.  He got on a horse and rode towards the downs, and went up the steep ascents at a gallop.  He stood amid the gorse at the top and viewed the great girdle of blue encircling sea, and the long string of coast towns lying below him, and far away.  Lunch was on the table when he returned.  After lunch, harassed by an obsession of architectural plans, he went out to sketch.  But it rained, and resisting his mother’s invitation to change his clothes, he sat down before the fire, damp without, and feverishly irritable within.  He vacillated an hour between his translation of St Fortunatus’ hymn, Quem terra, pontus aethera, and “Red as a Rose is She,” which, although he thought it as reprehensible for moral as for literary reasons, he was fain to follow out to the vulgar end.  But he could interest himself in neither hymn nor novel.  For the authenticity of the former he now cared not a jot, and he threw the book aside vowing that its hoydenish heroine was unbearable and he would read no more.

“I never knew a more horrible place to live in than Sussex.  Either of two things:  I must alter the architecture of this house, or I must return to Stanton College.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, do you think I don’t know you? you are boring yourself because Kitty is upstairs in bed, and cannot walk about with you.”

“I do not know how you contrive, mother, always to say the most disagreeable possible things; the marvellous way in which you pick out what will, at the moment, wound me most is truly wonderful.  I compliment you on your skill, but I confess I am at a loss to understand why you should, as if by right, expect me to remain here to serve continuously as a target for the arrows of your scorn.”