As for Héloïse's brother Lorry (Lorburn, of course) who sat extended in the hollow of a canvas chair, his handsome contemptuous head tilted back, and his feet on the verandah rail, Lorry, the fool, could see the view when he chose, and out of sheer perversity and posing, wouldn't—and that was worst of all, to his sister's thinking. "Oh, for God's sake, Halo, don't serve up the view again, there's a good girl! Shan't I ever be able to teach you not to have taste? The world's simply dying of a surfeit of scenery—an orgy of beauty. If my father would cut down some of those completely superfluous trees, and let us get a line on the chimney of the cement factory … It's a poor little chimney, of course, but it's got the supreme quality of ugliness. In certain lights, you know, it's almost as ugly as the Willows … or the Parthenon, say… ."

But unless there were visitors present Lorry seldom got as far as the Parthenon in his monologue, because he knew his family had long since discounted his opinions about beauty, and went on thinking of other things while he was airing them—even old George Frenside did nowadays, though once the boy's paradoxes had seemed to amuse him.

George Frenside was the other man on the verandah. There he sat, behind his sempiternal cigar, glowering into the tender spaces of the sky as if what he saw there were an offense to the human race; yet Halo wondered if one could say of those small deep-sunk eyes, forever watchful behind their old-fashioned pince-nez, that anything they rested on escaped them. Probably not; for in certain ways he was sensitive to beauty, and not afraid of it, like Lorry. Only, to move him, it had to be beauty of man's making, something wrung by human genius out of the stubborn elements. The sunset and the woodlands were nothing to him if they had not fed a poet or a painter—a poet preferably. Frenside had often said to Halo: "No, my child; remember I'm not a vegetarian—never could digest raw landscape." But that did not mean that he did not see it, did not parcel it out into its component parts with those cool classifying eyes. George Frenside was aware of most things; little escaped him of the cosmic spectacle. Only for him the beauty of the earth was something you could take apart, catalogue, and pigeonhole, and not the enveloping harmony it was to the girl who sat beside him looking out on the sunset opalescence at their feet.