Culture"; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could
be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world,
or plunge deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position.
But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the
whole incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they
put it--that for the production of its effects so little of a
given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and
so short a distance a difference.

"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives
such depth to their effects, such relief to their least
contrasts. They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every
exquisite mouthful."

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray
house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the
finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact
that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes,
abound the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having
been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had
probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no
doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet
drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond
between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and
Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.