“I’m going to Auntie Babs now.”

“Very well; give me a kiss first.”

Little Ann thrust up her face, so that its sudden little nose penetrated Lady Valleys’ soft curving lips....

When early that same afternoon Courtier, leaning on a stick, passed from his room out on to the terrace, he was confronted by three sunlit peacocks marching slowly across a lawn towards a statue of Diana.  With incredible dignity those birds moved, as if never in their lives had they been hurried.  They seemed indeed to know that when they got there, there would be nothing for them to do but to come back again.  Beyond them, through the tall trees, over some wooded foot-hills of the moorland and a promised land of pinkish fields, pasture, and orchards, the prospect stretched to the far sea.  Heat clothed this view with a kind of opalescence, a fairy garment, transmuting all values, so that the four square walls and tall chimneys of the pottery-works a few miles down the valley seemed to Courtier like a vision of some old fortified Italian town.  His sensations, finding himself in this galley, were peculiar.  For his feeling towards Miltoun, whom he had twice met at Mrs. Noel’s, was, in spite of disagreements, by no means unfriendly; while his feeling towards Miltoun’s family was not yet in existence.  Having lived from hand to mouth, and in many countries, since he left Westminster School, he had now practically no class feelings.  An attitude of hostility to aristocracy because it was aristocracy, was as incomprehensible to him as an attitude of deference.

His sensations habitually shaped themselves in accordance with those two permanent requirements of his nature, liking for adventure, and hatred of tyranny.  The labourer who beat his wife, the shopman who sweated his ‘hands,’ the parson who consigned his parishioners to hell, the peer who rode roughshod—­all were equally odious to him.  He thought of people as individuals, and it was, as it were, by accident that he had conceived the class generalization which he had fired back at Miltoun from Mrs. Noel’s window.  Sanguine, accustomed to queer environments, and always catching at the moment as it flew, he had not to fight with the timidities and irritations of a nervous temperament.  His cheery courtesy was only disturbed when he became conscious of some sentiment which appeared to him mean or cowardly.  On such occasions, not perhaps infrequent, his face looked as if his heart were physically fuming, and since his shell of stoicism was never quite melted by this heat, a very peculiar expression was the result, a sort of calm, sardonic, desperate, jolly look.