Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/146

132 clusters; there was no velvet in his carpets like the velvet of her turf. She had everything, or almost everything—she had space and time and the river. No one at Wilverley had the river as she had it; people might say of course there was little of it to have, but of whatever there was she was in intimate possession. It skirted her grounds and improved her property and amused her guests; she always held that her free access made up for being, as people said, on the wrong side of it. If she had not been on the wrong side she would not have had the little stone foot-bridge which was her special pride and the very making of her picture, and which she had heard compared—she had an off-hand way of bringing it in—to a similar feature, at Cambridge, of one of the celebrated "backs." The other side was the side of the other house, the side for the view—the view as to which she entertained the merely qualified respect excited in us, after the first creative flush, by mysteries of our own making. Mrs. Beever herself formed the view and the other house was welcome to it, especially to those parts of it enjoyed through the rare gaps in an interposing leafy lane. Tony had a gate which he called his river-gate, but