Adrian sat writing to his wife.

“Condaford: August 10.

“MY VERY DEAR —

“I promised to give you a true and particular account of how Dinny went off. Look in The Lantern for their conception of ‘the bride and bridegroom leaving the church.’ Fortunately, the lens of that enquiring organ caught them just before they pushed off — except in movies the camera simply cannot record movement; it always gets the sole of one foot cocked towards the eye, flannelises the knee of the other leg, and upsets the set of the trousers. Dornford looked quite good value — in this style, fourteen-and-six; and Dinny — bless her! — without the ‘bride’s smile,’ almost as if she saw the joke. Ever since the engagement, I’ve wondered what she’s really feeling. Love such as she gave Desert it certainly is not, but I don’t believe there’s any physical reluctance. When, yesterday, I said to her: ‘In good heart?’ her answer was: ‘No half heart, anyway.’ We both of us have reason to know that she can go all out in what she does for other people. But she’s really doing this for herself. She’ll be carrying on — she’ll have children — and she’ll count. That’s as it should be, and so I believe she feels. If she hasn’t what hopeful youth calls ‘a crush on’ Dornford, she admires and respects him, and I think quite rightly. Besides, he knows from me, if not from her, what she’s capable of, and won’t expect more until he gets it. The weather held up all right, and the church — wherein, by the way, your special correspondent was baptized — in the word of Verdant Green never looked ‘berrer.’ The congregation was perhaps a trifle Early English, though it seemed to me you could have got most of the faces at Woolworth’s.

“At the top of the nave, in the more holy positions, came our own gang, County and would-be County. The more I looked at County the more I thought how merciful that the states of life into which it has pleased God to call us have prevented the Charwells of our generation from looking County. Even Con and Liz, who have to stick down here all the time, haven’t got quite the hang of it. Remarkable, if you think, that there is such a thing as ‘County’ left; but I suppose it’ll last while there’s ‘huntin’ and shootin’. I remember, as a boy, out hunting (when I could screw a mount out of our stables or somebody else’s), I used to lurk out of reach of people for fear of having to talk to them, their words and music were so trying. Better to be human than County or even would-be County. I must say that Clare, after all her jollification in the courts, carried it off amazingly, and so far as I could see, nobody had the nerve to show any of the feelings which, as a fact, at this time of day, they probably hadn’t got. Then, a little less holy, came the village in force — Dinny’s a great favourite with them — quite a show of oldest inhabitants. Some real faces; an old chap called Downer, in a Bath chair, all ‘Whitechapel’ whiskers and beard, and shrewd remaining brown spaces. He perfectly remembered Hilary and me falling off a hay-cart we oughtn’t to have been on. And old Mrs. Tibwhite — a sweet old witch of a thing, who always let me eat her raspberries. The schoolchildren had a special holiday. Liz tells me not one in twenty of them has ever seen London, or indeed been ten miles out of the village, even now. But there’s a real difference in the young men and maidens. The girls have most excellent legs and stockings and quite tasteful dresses; and the youths good flannel suits and collars and ties — all done by the motor bike and the film. Lots of flowers in the church, and a good deal of bell-ringing and blowy organ-playing. Hilary did the swearing-in with his usual rapidity, and the old rector, who held the sponge, looked blue at the pace he went and the things he left out. Well, you want, of course, to hear about those dresses. The general effect, as they stood in the aisle, was what you might call delphinian. Dinny, even in white, has that look, and, consciously or not, the bridesmaids were togged up according; and what with Monica and Joan and two young Dornford nieces being slim and tall, they really looked like a planting of blue delphiniums, preceded by four blue tots, sweet, but none as pretty as Sheila. Really, that chickenpox was very perverse; you and your two were terribly missed, and Ronald as a page would just have topped everything up. I walked back to the Grange with Lawrence and Em, an imposing steel-grey presence slightly marred where ‘tears had got mixed with her powder sometimes.’ In fact, I had to stop her under a stricken tree and do some good work with one of those silk handkerchiefs you gave me. Lawrence was in feather — thought the whole show the least gimcrack thing he had seen for a long time, and had now more hope of the pound going still lower. Em had been to see the house on Campden Hill; she predicted that Dinny would be in love with Dornford within a year, which started another tear, so I called her attention to the tree which had in fact been struck by lightning while she and I and Hilary were standing under it. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you were squits — so providential; and the butler made a penholder out of the wood; it wouldn’t hold nibs, so I gave it to Con for school, and he cursed me. Lawrence, I’m old.’ Whereon Lawrence took her hand, and they walked hand in hand the rest of the way.

“The reception was held on the terrace and lawn; everybody came, schoolchildren and all, a quaint mix-up, but jolly, it seemed to me. I didn’t know I was so fond of the old place. However much one may believe in levelling-up chances, there’s something about old places. They can’t be re-created if they’re once let slip, and they focus landscape in a queer kind of way. Some villages and landscapes seem to have no core — you can’t explain why, but they feel hollow, and shallow and flat. A real old place puts heart into a neighbourhood. If the people who live in it are not just selfish pigs, it means a lot in a quiet way to people who have no actual ownership in it. The Grange is a sort of anchor to this neighbourhood. I doubt if you’d find a single villager, however poor, who grudged its existence, or wouldn’t feel the worse for its ruination. Generations of love and trouble, and goodness knows not too much money, have been spent on it, and the result is something very hand-made and special. Everything’s changing, and has got to change, no doubt, and how to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about. We save our works of art, our old furniture, we have our cult — and a strong one — of ‘antiques,’ and not even the most go-ahead modern thought objects to that. Why not the same ............