Nataly heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer.  She had to cease to pray.

CHAPTER IX

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS

One may not have an intention to flourish, and may be pardoned for a semblance of it, in exclaiming, somewhat royally, as creator and owner of the place:  ‘There you see Lakelands.’

The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a rise of road fronting an undulation, where our modern English architect’s fantasia in crimson brick swept from central gables to flying wings, over pents, crooks, curves, peaks, cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections, away to a red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious in irregularity; and coloured homely with the greensward about it, the pines beside it, the clouds above it.  Not many palaces would be reckoned as larger.  The folds and swells and stream of the building along the roll of ground, had an appearance of an enormous banner on the wind.  Nataly looked.  Her next look was at Colney Durance.  She sent the expected nods to Victor’s carriage.  She would have given the whole prospect for the covering solitariness of her chamber.  A multitude of clashing sensations, and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled her to summon so as to force herself to feel a groundless anger, directed against none, against nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only resource for keeping down the great wave surgent at her eyes.

Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations encircling him.  He led through the straight passage of the galleried hall, offering two fair landscapes at front door and at back, down to the lake, Fredi’s lake; a good oblong of water, notable in a district not abounding in the commodity.  He would have it a feature of the district; and it had been deepened and extended; up rose the springs, many ran the ducts.  Fredi’s pretty little bathshed or bower had a space of marble on the three-feet shallow it overhung with a shade of carved woodwork; it had a diving-board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and small row-boat of elegant build hard by.  Green ran the banks about, and a beechwood fringed with birches curtained the Northward length:  morning sun and evening had a fair face of water to paint.  Saw man ever the like for pleasing a poetical damsel?  So was Miss Fredi, the coldest of the party hitherto, and dreaming a preference of ‘old places’ like Creckholt and Craye Farm, ‘captured to be enraptured,’ quite according to man’s ideal of his beneficence to the sex.  She pressed the hand of her young French governess, Louise de Seilles.  As in everything he did for his girl, Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience and her tastes:  the pine-panels of the interior, the shelves for her books, pegs to hang her favourite drawings, and the couch-bunk under a window to conceal the summerly recliner while throwing full light on her book; and the hearth-square for logs, when she wanted fire:  because Fredi bathed in any weather:  the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings of doves, tits, fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings she was to choose, and have shy odalisque peeps of sunny water from her couch.