IT continued to be for the lady of Eastmead, as the years went on, a sustaining reflection that if in the matter of upholstery she yielded somewhat stiffly to the other house, so the other house was put out of all countenance² by the mere³ breath of her garden. Tony could beat her indoors at every point, but when she took her stand on her lawn she could defy not only Bounds but Wilverley. Her stand, and still more her seat, in the summer days, was frequent there, as we easily gather from the fortified⁴ position in which we next encounter her. From May to October she was out, as she said, at grass, drawing from it most of the time a comfortable sense that on such ground as this her young friend’s love of new ness broke down. He might make his dinner-service as new as he liked; she triumphed precisely⁵ in the fact that her trees and her shrubs⁶ were old. He could hang nothing on his walls like her creepers and clusters; there was no velvet⁷ in his carpets like the velvet of her turf. She had everything, or almost everything she had space and time and the river. No one at Wilverley had the river as she had it; people might say of course there was little of it to have, but of whatever there was she was in intimate possession. It skirted her grounds and improved her property and amused her guests; she always held that her free access made up for being, as people said, on the wrong side of it. If she had not been on the wrong side she would not have had the little stone foot-bridge which was her special pride and the very making of her picture, and which she had heard compared she had an off-hand way of bringing it in to a similar feature, at Cambridge, of one of the celebrated⁸ “ backs.” The other side was the side of the other house, the side for the view the view as to which she entertained ihe merely qualified⁹ respect excited in us, after the first creative flush, by mysteries of our own making. Mrs. Beever herself formed the view and the other house was welcome to it, especially to those parts of it enjoyed through the rare gaps in an interposing leafy lane. Tony had a gate which he called his river-gate, but you didn’t so much as suspect the stream till you got well out of it. He had on his further quarter a closer contact with the town; but this was just what on both quarters she had with the country. Her approach to the town was by the “ long way ” and the big bridge, and by going on, as she liked to do, past the Doctor’s square red house. She hated stopping there, hated it as much as she liked his stopping at Eastmead: in the former case she seemed to consult him and in the latter to advise, which was the exercise of her wisdom that she decidedly preferred. Such degrees and dimensions, I hasten to add, had to do altogether with short relations and small things; but it was just the good lady’s reduced scale that held her little world together. So true is it that from strong compres sion the elements of drama spring and that there are conditions in which they seem to invite not so much the opera-glass as the microscope.

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