Outside the Rectory Mark spent most of his time with Richard Ford, the son of the Vicar of Little Fairfield, with whom he went to work in the autumn after his arrival in Oxfordshire. Here again Mark was lucky, for Richard, who was a year or two older than himself and a student at Cooper's Hill whence he would emerge as a civil engineer bound for India, was one of those entirely admirable young men who succeed in being saintly without any rapture or righteousness.
"Rector, you know, Richard Ford really is a saint; only for goodness' sake don't tell him I said so, because he'd be furious."
The Rector stopped humming a joyful _Miserere_ to give Mark an assurance of his discretion. But Mark having said so much in praise of Richard could say no more, and indeed he would have found it hard to express in words what he felt about his friend.
Mark accompanied Richard on his visits to Wychford Rectory where in this fortunate corner of England existed a third perfect family. Richard was deeply in love with Margaret Grey, the second daughter, and if Mark had ever been intended to fall in love he would certainly have fallen in love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.
"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard. "Walking down the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning I saw two blue butterflies on a wild rose, and they were like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like her cheek."
"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.
Mark had had such a limited experience of the world that the amenities of the society in which he found himself incorporated did not strike his imagination as remarkable. It was in truth one of those eclectic, somewhat exquisite, even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced partly by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most of all, it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The genius of Cotswolds imparts to those who come beneath his influence the art of existing appropriately in the houses that were built at his inspiration. They do not boast of their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not living up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their voices lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind through willows and aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales or the sea.