Pansy said, "Oh, you two. You'll be goin' baby-huntin' in the ditches, I should think, instead of pickin' primroses. I should say you jolly well ought, and you'd better take the Cheeper's pram with you."
Anthony said, "Exactly what I always try not to do, going out on Sundays with the people from my shop. It spoils the Sabbath rest, the Pisgah's mountain touch. You'd much better come out with Cyril and Pansy and me."
"I," said Cyril, in his detached manner, "shall be going to Mass."
5
They walked up through the depraved mushroom growth round Beaconsfield station to the old town that city set on a hill, lying wide and spacious, with its four Ends stretched out like a cross. Old Beaconsfield is an enchanted city; as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it is to-day, an ancient country town, full of brick walls and old houses, and courtyards and coaching inns, and dignity and romance and great elms. But they left it behind them, and took the lane that runs to Hedgerley, with the cold April wind in their faces.
They came, four miles on, to the forest of great beeches, where broad glades and grassy rides run in and out through thickets of wild undergrowth and bracken, and ancient twisted boles and slim smooth grey-green stems are set close together under a rustling singing roof of brilliant green, the young, new-born, radiant green of beeches in April. In every hollow and dip of the forest's mossy floor, primroses glimmered in pale pools.
They sat down by one of these pools to have their lunch.
After lunch they lay on there and smoked. Chester lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the green roof. Kitty, her round chin cupped in her two hands, lay and watched his lean, sallow, clever face, foreshortened, with the shadows of the leaves moving on it and his eyes screwed against the sun.
"Kitty," said Chester presently, "I want to talk to you."
"M—m." Kitty, having finished her cigarette, was chewing grass.