But Enid was somehow languid, listless, even lumpish, and Mrs. Thompson did nearly all the looking and talking.
"I always think that is such an imposing place. The entrance seems to warn one off—to tell one not to forget what a tremendous swell the owner is."
They were passing the lodge-gates of a great nobleman's seat, and one had a rapid impression of much magnificence. Stone piers, sculptured urns, floreated iron, massive chains; and behind the forbidding barrier a vista of swept gravel and mown grass, with solemn conifers proudly ranked, and standard rhododendrons just beginning pompously to bloom—no glimpse of the mansion itself, but an intuitive perception of something vast, remote, unattainable.
Enid looked through the bars at my lord's gravel drive attentively, almost wistfully, perhaps thinking of the few and august people to whom these splendours would be familiar—of the lucky people who are brought up in palaces instead of in shops.
"It is a meet of hounds." Miss Enid broke a long silence to give her mother this information. "And when I was staying at Colonel Salter's, I met a man who had once been to a ball there."
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Thompson, with cheerful briskness, "now you mention hunting, that reminds me. We must get you on horseback again.... You do like your riding, don't you?"
"Oh, yes," said Enid listlessly.
"Mr. Young said you were making such good progress. And," added Mrs. Thompson gently, "it is a pity to take up things and drop them. It is just wasted effort—if one stops before reaching the goal."
The road, turning and crossing the railway, gave them a well-known view of Mallingbridge—the town quite at its best, four miles away in the middle of the broad plain, smoke and haze hanging over it, but with tempered sunlight glistening on countless roofs, and the square tower of St. Saviour's and the tall spire of Holy Trinity rising proudly above the mass of lesser buildings. There, stretched at her feet, was Mrs. Thompson's world, the world that she had conquered.