It is a pleasant place as well as a restful. Passing through it, people say, "Oh, what a dream!" living in it one is driven at last to admit there are dreams and dreams. It is not the place that forces this conviction but the people.
Just as the Roman road narrows at the beginning of the High Street, so the life of a stranger coming, say, from London, narrows at the beginning of his or her residence in Upton. If you are a villager you find yourself under a microscope with three hundred eyes at the eyepiece; if you are a genteel person, but without introductions, you find yourself the target of half a score of telescopes levelled at you by the residents.
Colonel Salmon—who owned the fishing rights of the trout-stream below hill—the Talbot-Tomsons, the Griffith-Smiths, the Grosvenor-Jones and the rest, all these, failing introductions, you will find to be passive resisters to your presence.
Now, caution towards strangers and snobbishness are two different things. The Uptonians are snobbish because, though you may be as beautiful as a dream or as innocent as a saint, you will be sniffed at and turned over; but if you are wealthy it is another matter, as in the case of the Smyth-Smyths, who were neither beautiful nor innocent—but that is another story.
"The village is a mile further on," said Pugeot; "let's turn down here before we go to the hotel and have afternoon tea with my cousin. Randall, steer for The Nook."
The car was not the Dragon-Fly, but a huge closed limousine, with Mudd seated beside Randall, and inside, the rest of that social menagerie about to be landed on the residents of Upton upon the landing-stage of the social position of Dick Pugeot's cousin, Sir Squire Simpson.
All the introductions in the world could not be better than the personal introduction to the Resident of Upton by the Hon. Richard Pugeot.
They passed lodge gates and then up a pleasant drive to a big house-front, before which a small garden-party seemed to be going on; a big afternoon tea it was, and there were men in flannels, and girls in summer frocks, and discarded tennis racquets lying about, and the sight of all this gave Bobby a horrible turn.
Uncle Simon had been very quiet during the journey—happy but quiet—squeezed between the two women, but this was not the sort of place he wanted to land Uncle Simon in despite his quietude and happiness. Mudd evidently also had qualms, for he kept looking back through the glass front of the car and seemed trying to catch Bobby's eye.
But there was no turning back.