"Only for this year. We have secured a ninety-nine years' lease of what is called 'a desirable site,' and are going to build a house on it after our own hearts, which will give us unalloyed joy in the building and acute disappointment when it is finished. But the joy will outweigh the disappointment, as it really always does."
"Then shall you spend the autumn here?" I asked as we wended our way down one of the green aisles of the fruit garden.
"Yes. I have been rather seedy—overdone, you know, with trying to get more out of life than there was in it, and pretending to Paul that the Golden Age was going to begin next week, because he minded so dreadfully when he thought it wasn't—so the doctors ordered me to take draughts of the Elixir of East Coast air in order to get young again."
"I am sorry—very sorry—to hear you haven't been well. I know of old how you have always hated to be hors de combat."
"And I hate it still—especially when Paul is in Office, and I want to stand by him and help him. But for a long time I, who so wanted to 'serve,' was obliged—like Milton—to 'stand and wait': and even that I had to do lying down! But now I am all right again, and we are going to have a permanent country house, so that the next time I have to 'stand and wait' I can do it in the garden."
"And where is the desirable site?" I cried.
She named a place about twenty miles from Restham.
"Oh, what luck for us!" I cried. "You will be within easy motoring distance."
"Yes, easy enough when you want to see us, and not too easy if you don't. We seem to want a house of our own in which to spend our declining years, surrounded by all the fads that we most affect: and we can't find them quite all in houses built by other people. Of course we shan't find them all in the house we build ourselves, but then we shall only have ourselves to blame, and that makes one so much more merciful and lenient. We couldn't get a freehold site that was exactly what we both wanted, and as we have no children it doesn't signify: as a matter of fact, a leasehold peerage would have done just as well for us."
I noted the faint quiver in her voice with a pang of sympathy. I too felt that life would never be quite complete as long as Ponty reigned alone in the old nursery at Restham.