To Alice the speech was the breaking of idols. Competence,
responsibility were words she had been taught to revere, and to hear
them light-heartedly disavowed seemed an upturning of the foundation of
things. You will perceive that her education had not included that
valuable art, the appreciation of the flippant.

By this time the carriage was entering the gates of the park, and the
thick wood cleared and revealed long vistas of short hill grass, rising
and falling like moorland, and studded with solitary clumps of firs.
Then a turn in the drive brought them once more into shadow, this time
beneath a heath-clad knoll where beeches and hazels made a pleasant
tangle. All this was new, not three years old; but soon they were in
the ancient part of the policy which had surrounded the old house of
Glenavelin. Here the grass was lusher, the trees antique oaks and
beeches, and grey walls showed the boundary of an old pleasure-ground.
Here in the soft sunlit afternoon sleep hung like a cloud, and the peace
of centuries dwelt in the long avenues and golden pastures. Another
turning and the house came in sight, at first glance a jumble of grey
towers and ivied walls. Wings had been built to the original square
keep, and even now it was not large, a mere moorland dwelling. But the
whitewashed walls, the crow-step gables, and the quaint Scots baronial
turrets gave it a perfection to the eye like a house in a dream. To
Alice, accustomed to the vulgarity of suburban villas with Italian
campaniles, a florid lodge a stone's throw from the house, darkened too
with smoke and tawdry with paint, this old-world dwelling was a patch of
wonderland. Her eyes drank in the beauty of the place--the great blue
backs of hill beyond, the acres of sweet pasture, the primeval woods.

"Is this Glenavelin?" she cried. "Oh, what a place to live in!"