Or her inhabitants either!  Lawrence, without country, creed, profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most self-centred class.  In his set, frank egoism was the only motive for which one need not apologize.  But in Chilmark it was not so.  Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester and his wife and Jack Bendish.  What were these forces?  Lawrence thought in flashes, by imagery, scene after scene flitting before him out of the last forty-eight hours.  Homespun virtues:  unselfishness, indifference to money values, the constant sense of filial, fraternal, social responsibility . . . the glow in Jack’s eyes when they rested on his wife:  Verney’s war on cesspools:  Leverton Morley as scoutmaster:  the Chinese lecture:  rosebushes in the churchyard, by the great stone cross with its list of names beginning “George Potts, Wiltshire Rifles, aged 49,” and ending “Robert Denis Bendish, Grenadier Guards, aged 19:  Into Thy Hands, O Lord”:  old, old feudal England, closeknit, no pastoral of easy virtues, yet holding together in a fellowship which underlies class disunion:  whose sons, from days long before the Conquest, have always desired to go to sea when the cuckoo sang, and to come home again when they were tired of the hail and salt showers, because they could not bear to be landless and lordless men. . . .

[Footnote]

“Swylce geac mona geomran reorde, singe sumeres weard, sorge beade bittre in breosthord; pset se beorn ne wat, secg esteadig, hwset pa sume dreoga, pe pa wrseclastas widost lecga! . . . . pince him on mode pset he his monndryhten clyppe and cysse andon cneo lecge honda and heafod; ponne onwsecne, gesihp him beforan fealwe wegas, bapian brimfuglas.”

“Even so the cuckoo warns him with its sad voice, Summer’s warden sings foreboding sorrow, bitter grief of heart.  Little knows the prosperous fellow what others are doing who follow far and wide the tracks of exile . . .  Then dreams the seafarer that he clasps his lord and kisses him, and on his knee lays hand and head; but he awakes and sees before him the fallow waterways and the sea-fowls bathing.”

[End of Footnote]

Lawrence flung off the impression with a jerk of his shoulders, as if it were a physical weight.  It was too heavy to be endured.  Not even to marry Isabel was he going to impose on his own unbroken egoism the restricting code of a country village.

“You are a dreamer, Val!  Why don’t you throw over Bernard and take the Etchingham agency?  Yes, I heard every word you said to Laura:  you made a gallant effort, but the facts speak for themselves, and your terminological inexactitudes wouldn’t deceive a babe at the breast.  Bernard pays you 300 pounds a year and orders you about like a groom, Grautchester would give you six and behave like a gentleman.  But no, you must needs stick to Bernard, though you never get any thanks for it!  You’re an unpractical dreamer.”