crisis and summit of enjoyment.

He rose, as if to follow Margaret, who had disappeared through
the window he only awaited Mrs. Hale's permission. She would
rather have wound up the dinner in the proper way, and with all
the ceremonies which had gone on so smoothly hitherto, especially
as she and Dixon had got out the finger-glasses from the
store-room on purpose to be as correct as became General Shaw's
widow's sister, but as Mr. Hale got up directly, and prepared to
accompany his guest, she could only submit.

'I shall arm myself with a knife,' said Mr. Hale: 'the days of
eating fruit so primitively as you describe are over with me. I
must pare it and quarter it before I can enjoy it.'

Margaret made a plate for the pears out of a beetroot leaf, which
threw up their brown gold colour admirably. Mr. Lennox looked
more at her than at the pears; but her father, inclined to cull
fastidiously the very zest and perfection of the hour he had
stolen from his anxiety, chose daintily the ripest fruit, and sat
down on the garden bench to enjoy it at his leisure. Margaret and
Mr. Lennox strolled along the little terrace-walk under the south
wall, where the bees still hummed and worked busily in their
hives.

'What a perfect life you seem to live here! I have always felt
rather contemptuously towards the poets before, with their
wishes, "Mine be a cot beside a hill," and that sort of thing:
but now I am afraid that the truth is, I have been nothing better
than a cockney. Just now I feel as if twenty years' hard study of