My mother said this was the New Consecration¹. He is the stuff of the dévot, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic², or a saint.  
I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping³ us to re-stock our aquarium⁴.
 
Hermione Helmstone's inclination⁵ to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushing Schwärmerei, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics⁶.
 
The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor.
 
Hermione pretended that she came solely⁷ to keep Barbara in countenance⁸.
 
But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.
 
She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?"—a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put.[Pg 69]
 
"Three weeks."
 
"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious⁹ sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."
 
He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays—thank God!—in a laboratory.
 
Which was scarcely polite.
 
"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed¹⁰, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."
 
He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.
 
"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance—oh, naturally, not her kind.
 
What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.
 
Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch¹¹ Granite," and that she lamented¹² Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed¹³ at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy¹⁴ of the servants' hall. A marble terrace by moonlight....[Pg 70] No? Well, then, the supper-room at the Carlton—Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss¹⁵ of the most expensive brand."
 
They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind. For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."
 
"Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made in the feuilleton of a certain paper.
 
Hermione was not a bit dashed. "You may look for romance in bottles if you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin.
 
"Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"
 
"Orange blossoms," says she promptly¹⁶; "not little bits of brain."
 
He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said, would be waiting for his foursome.
 
A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of "story-telling."[Pg 71]
 
"You said you were only going to stay three weeks."
 
To our astonishment¹⁷ he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly."
 
"——and all the while arranging to settle down and live here."
 
I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously.
 
"What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded.
 
"Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in the country?"
 
"Oh! you mean my penny bungalow¹⁸." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said.
 
As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara seemed to speak for him. "——just to live in for a while," she said quite gently.
 
"Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap¹⁹ of the canvas golf-bag over his shoulder, and made for the front-door.
 
"What do you want a bungalow for, then?"[Pg 72] Hermione's teasing voice followed after him.
 
"——mere harmless eccentricity²⁰." He was "like that," he said. He turned round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before.
 
Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have some place to keep one's traps," he called back.
 
Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face almost beautiful.
 
I felt that Eric had come lamely²¹ out of the encounter. What did it all mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow.
 
A hideous²² little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated²³ iron, painted arsenic²⁴ green, it came down from London in sections, and was set up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard²⁵.[Pg 73]
 
The field belonged to Lord Helmstone.
 
Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work.
 
As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy²⁶ with the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken of the melancholy²⁸ moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let down; of the baa-ing and grunting²⁹ and the eternal barking that went on. And those noises—which he was, strangely, still more sensitive to—produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath³⁰ Eric's window; and by the ducks and geese hissing³¹ and clacking on the pond between the house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at "country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that reigned³² at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us—Eric rather out of temper, presenting his grievance³³ with great spirit:
 
"——wretched man sits up addling³⁴ his brains till two in the morning. At four, this kind of[Pg 74] thing——" In a quiet, meditative³⁵ way he would begin clucking. Then quacking³⁷, almost sleepily at first; then with more and more fervour till he would leave the ducks and soar away on the ecstasy³⁸ of a loud, exuberant³⁹ crow. All this not the least in the sketchy⁴⁰, impressionist way that most people who try will imitate those humble⁴¹ noises, but............