And Katherine saw priceless gems of art and splendour of gilding and tapestry, and hangings, and great ghostly beds surmounted with nodding ostrich plumes. And stuffs from Venice and Lyons—and even Spitalfields.
"How wonderful!" she said at last—"And there are many other places such as this in England! How great and rich a country it is. We—the middle class population—shut in with our narrow parochial views—do not realise it at all, or we would be very proud of our race owning such glorious things, and would not want to encourage stupid paltry politicians to destroy and dissipate them all, and scatter them to the winds."
"It may seem hard in their view that one man should possess, we will say, Valfreyne."
"But how stupid! How could it all have been accumulated, but for individual wealth and taste and tradition? Who really cares for museums except to study examples in? Do you know, for instance, such people as my sisters would a thousand times rather walk through these rooms on a day when the public is let in, feeling it was a house owned by people who really lived there, than go to any place given to the nation, like Hampton Court or the Wallace Collection."
"That is the human interest in the thing."
"Yes, but the human and the personal are the strongest and most binding of all interests."
Mordryn looked at her appreciatively—he delighted in hearing her views.
"Then you have no feeling that you wish all this to be divided up among the people of Lulworth, say—the large town near?"
"Oh! no, no! So strongly do I feel for the law by which all goes to the eldest son, that were I a younger one, I would willingly give up my share to ensure the family continuing great. Who that can see clearly would not rather be a younger son of a splendid house, than a little, ridiculous nobody on his own account,—if everything were to be divided up."