On the whole, Roland was happy at the office, but the evenings were distressing: the bus ride back; the walk up the hot stuffy street towards his home; the subsequent walk with his father; the same walk every day along the hard, flag-stoned roads, during which they met the same dispirited men hurrying home from work. London was horrible in June, with its metallic heat, its dust, and the dull leaves of the plane-trees scattering their mournful shadows. How sombre, too, were the long evenings after the wretched two-course dinner, in the small suburban drawing-room—ill lit, ill ventilated, meanly furnished. It was not surprising that he should accept eagerly the Marstons' frequent invitations to spend the week-end with them in the country; it was another world, a cleaner, fresher world, where you were met at the station, where you drove through a long, winding drive to an old Georgian house, where you dressed for dinner, where you drank crusted port as you cracked your walnuts. Yet it was not this material well-being that he so highly valued as the setting it provided for a gracious interchange of courtesy, for the leisured preliminaries of friendship, for ornament and decoration.
Was anything in his life better than that moment on a Friday evening when from the corner seat of a railway carriage he watched the smoke and chimneys of London fall behind him, when through the window he saw, instead of streets and shops and houses, green fields and hedges and small scattered villages, and knew that for forty-eight hours he could forget the fretted uneasiness of his home.
He was invited during August to spend a whole week at Hogstead. Several others would be there, and there would be cricket every day.
"We can't do without you," Mr Marston had said, "and what's more, we don't intend to."
"Of course, we don't," said Muriel; "you've got to come!"
Naturally Roland did not need much pressing.
[CHAPTER XIII]
LILITH OF OLD