"Last lap!" Edwy shouted. "Don't go on jabbering about Oxford."
They were driving along a quiet road of decorous Georgian houses, at the end of which was a castellated gateway.
"Here's the Close," Edred cried as they passed under the arch into a green and grey world. "Blue leads! Blue leads!"
"Shut up, you fool, I'm Blue!" yelled the youngest.
While the rival charioteers punched each other behind their brother's back, Purple in the personification of Edwy pulled up at the Deanery and claimed to be the victor. The serenity of the Close after that break-neck drive from the station was complete. The voices of the charioteers arguing about their race blended with the chatter of the jackdaws speckling the great west front of the Cathedral in a pleasant enough discordancy of sound that only accentuated the surrounding peacefulness. Upon the steps that led up to the west door the figures of tourists or worshippers appeared against the legended background no larger than birds. At no point did the world intrude, for the houses of the dignitaries round their quadrangle of grass had nothing to do with the world, and if a town of Silchester existed, it was hidden as completely by the massed elm trees that rose up behind the low houses of the Dean and Chapter as the ancient Roman city was hidden in the grass that now waved above its buried pavements and long lost porticoes.
"It really is glorious here, isn't it?" Jasmine exclaimed.
"Yes, it's rather decent," Edred allowed. "We've got a swannery at the back of our garden, and that's rather decent too. They get awfully waxy sometimes. The swans, I mean," he supplemented. And in such surroundings, Jasmine felt, even swans had no business to lose their tempers.
The Deanery itself was externally the gravest and most impressive of the many grave and impressive houses round the Close. Beheld thus it presented such an imperturbable perfection of appearance that before he knocked upon its door or rang its bright brass bell, the most self-satisfied visitor would always accord it the respect of a momentary pause. But when the door was opened--and it was opened by a butler with all the outward and visible signs of what a decanal butler ought to be--that air of prosperous comfort, of dignity and solid charm, vanished. It was not that the entrance-hall was ill-equipped. Everything was there that one could have expected to find in a Dean's hall; but everything had an indescribably battered look, the irreverent mark that an invading army passing through Silchester might have left upon the Deanery, had some of the soldiers been billeted there. It was haunted by a sense of everything's having served some other purpose from that for which it was originally intended, and the farther one penetrated into the house the more evident were the ravages of whatever ruinous influence had been at work. Even Jasmine with her slight experience of English houses was taken aback by the contradiction between the exterior and the interior of the Deanery. She was used to entering Italian palaces and finding interiors as bare and comfortless as a barrack; but in them the discomfort and bareness had always been due to the inadequate means of their owners. It was certainly not poverty that caused the contradiction at the Deanery. The solution of the puzzle burst upon her when with a simultaneous onrush her cousins, each shouting at the top of his voice 'Bags I telling the mater Jasmine is here,' stormed the staircase like troops. The butler, listening to their yells dying away along the landing above, paused for a moment from the gracious pomp of his ministrations and observed to Jasmine: "Very high-spirited young gentlemen."
