"Could I come in and help?" offered Guy.
"Well, now that would certainly be most kind," said the Rector; and his thin handsome face lit up with the excitement of infecting Guy with his own passion. "But aren't you busy?"
"Oh, no. I usually work at night."
So Guy came to plant tulips and from planting tulips to being asked to lunch was not far, and from finishing off a few left over to being asked to tea was not far either. Moreover when the tulips were all planted, there were gladioli to be sorted and put away. Incidentally too the punt had to be caulked and the boathouse had to be strengthened, so that in the end it was half way into November before Guy realized he had been coming to the Rectory almost every day. The more he came, however, the more he was fascinated by the family. They still eluded him, and he was always aware, particularly between Margaret and Pauline, of a life in which as yet he hardly shared. At the same time, so familiar now were the inner places of the house and most of all the nursery, he felt as if happily there would come a day when to none of the sisters would he seem more noticeable than one of their tumbledown armchairs.
Once or twice he stayed to dinner, and the long dining-room with the sea-grey wall-paper and curtains of the strawberry-thief design was always entered with a particular contentment of spirit. The table was very large, for somebody always forgot to take out the extra leaf put in for a dinner sometime last summer, or perhaps two summers ago. The result was that the Rector was far away in the shadows at one end; Mrs. Grey equally remote at the other; while Guy would in turn be near to Margaret or Pauline or even Monica in the middle. Old fashioned glasses with spirals of green and white blown in their stems; silver that was nearly diaphanous with use and age; candlesticks solid as the Ionic columns they counterfeited, or tapering and fluted with branches that carried the candle-flames like flowers, everything seemed as if it had been created for this room alone. From the wall a lacquered clock as round and big and benign as the setting sun wavered in the coppery shadows of the fire, and with scarcely the sound of a tick showed forth time. Guy had never appreciated the sacredness of eating in good company until he dined casually like this at the Rectory. He never knew what he ate and always accepted what was put before him like manna; yet he was always conscious of having enjoyed the meal, and next morning he used to face, unabashed, Miss Peasey's tale of ruined tapioca which had waited for him too long.
The seal of perfection was generally set on these unexpected dinners by chamber-music afterward, when under the arched roof of the big music-room for an hour or more of trios and quartets Guy contemplated that family. The Greys could not have revealed the design of their life with anything but chamber-music, and setting aside any expression of inward things, thought Guy, how would it be possible to imagine them more externally decorative than seated so at this formal industry of art? He liked best perhaps the trios, when he and Mrs. Grey, each in a Caroline chair with tall wicker back, remained outside, and yet withal as much in the picture as two donors painted by an old Florentine. Monica in a white dress sat straight and stiff with pale gold hair that seemed the very colour of the refined, the almost rarefied accompaniment upon which her fingers quivered and rippled. Something of her own coldness and remoteness and crystalline severity she brought to her instrument, as if upon a windless day a fountain played forth its pattern. Margaret's amber dress deepened from the shade of Monica's hair, and Margaret's eyes glowed deep and solemn as the solemn depths of the violoncello over which she hung with a thought of motherhood in the way she cherished it. Was it she, wondered Guy, who was the ultimate lure of this house, or was it Pauline? Of her, as she swayed to the violin, nothing could be said but that from a rose-bloomed radiance issued a sound of music. And how clearly in the united effect of the three sisters was written the beauty of their lives. Guy could almost see every hour of their girlhood passing in orderly pattern, as the divine Hours dance along a Grecian frieze. There was neither passion nor sentiment in the music: there was neither sorrow nor regret. It was heartless in its limpid beauty; it was remote as a cloud against the sunrise; cold as water was it, and incommunicable as a dream; yet in solitude when Guy reconjured the sound afterward, it returned to his memory like fire.
A great occasion for Guy was the afternoon when first the Greys came to tea with him at Plashers Mead. Himself went into Wychford and bought the cakes, so many that Miss Peasey held up her hands with that ridiculously conventional gesture of surprize she used, exclaiming:
"Oh, dear, this is a variety!"
Guy led them solemnly round the house and furnished the empty rooms with such vivid descriptions that their emptiness was scarcely any longer perceptible. In his own room he waited anxiously for judgment. Margaret was of course the first to declare an opinion. She did not like his curtains nor his green canvas, and she was by no means willing to accept his excuse that they were relics of undergraduate taste.
"If you don't like them now, why do you have them? Why not plain white for the walls and no curtains at all, until you can get ones you really do like?"