“England?” gasped Lucilla and Ruth in one breath.
“Why not?” enquired the man of the family. “You are, after all, never so comfortable anywhere, in Winter, as in an English Country House. Roaring fires, invisible hot-water pipes; cozy dark days, libraries full of books, Mudie by post two hours away. Wassailing and Christmas waits; holly and mistletoe, hey for an English winter, sing I! Plum pudding, mince pies, tenants to tip, neighbours, hospitalities.”
“Ugh,” Lucilla wailed, “Perish the awful thought! Neighbours 'calling in sensible, slightly muddy boots' (as your favourite author too truthfully has it), in tweeds and short skirts;—and for conversation—Heaven defend us! The turnip crops, the Pytchley, penny readings, and the latest gossip anent a next-door neighbour. Night all the day—night again at night—and whisky-and-soda at eleven, day or night,—eternally variegated by that boring, semper-eternal Bridge. You'll have to go without me,” declared Lucilla flatly.
“Have you generally Wintered in the North, Summered in the South?” Ruth queried with a gleam.
“No—No,—” replied Pontycroft reflectively, “no,—but if one hasn't really tried it since one's callow days the idea does speak to one. It isn't all beautiful prattle,” he assured her, “but the idea does appeal to one. As one grows old one prefers to be comfortable. A pabulum of beauty is all very well for young things like yourself here and Lucilla who still hug the precious foolish delusion that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”
Pontycroft's indolent glance encompassed Florence,—that fair spectacle she presents, in the aura of twilight,—the exquisite hour, l'heure exquise. Her amphitheatre of hills,—her white villas, even now charged with rose by the evening glow,—aglow her churches, her gardens and black cypresses. “Yet this is all too like,” he commented, “the enchanter's dream,—at a puff!... No! Fact, Fact, solid Fact is the desideratum! Fact's your miracle in a nutshell. What you and Lucilla call Truth alters with every fresh discovery of man, his climate, education, point of view. Man carries your Beauty in his eye, ears, senses. But Fact, humanly speaking, Fact doesn't give you the least trouble. There it is. Did it never occur to you how splendidly reposeful a fact it is that a turnip field's a turnip field, until you sow beans to rejuvenate it? And here's another, equally comforting: The spider spins its web from its own vitals. Ah, Facts spare one such a deal of thinking, such a lot of enthusiasm!... In your country, my dear young thing,” Pontycroft turned to Ruth, “in your strange, weird, singular, incomprehensible country they sow buckwheat cakes when the turf on the lawn's been killed by frosts; and when the buckwheat cakes have grown, and blossomed—they plough them back into the earth, and sow their grass—and in a month you have your velvet robe again. In similar manner the fact that a cozy English Winter's a cozy English Winter is one agreeably worthy your attention.”
“This flummery of rose bushes,” went on Pontycroft, while his arm described a semicircle,—“this romance of nodding trees laden with oranges ornamental to the landscape; this volubility of heliotrope, mimosa, violets in January, all, all—in a conspiracy to lure one to sit out o' doors and catch an internal, infernal chill,” he sneezed; “all this taken together is not worth that one fine solid indisputable British Fact, a comfortable English Winter! Uncompromising cold without, cheer within.”
“But it's not Winter yet,” Lucilla argued plaintively, “it's only October. Hadn't you better apply the fact of an overcoat to what you've been telling us? You've plunged me into anything but a state of cheer with your sophistries—this absurd juggling with the doleful joys of an English Winter!”
“Apropos of the joys of an English Winter, I wonder whether the post has come?” said Ruth, jumping up. “Pietro's delicacy about disturbing us at tea Lucilla won't call mere laziness. I'll send him for your overcoat,” she added, with a laughing nod, and vanished through the French windows.