It was, with one exception, the only house he ever built. It was quite original in design and almost indistinguishable from the houses of a round dozen contemporaries of Mr. Charles Voysey. It was a little low-browed, white house, with an enormous and very expensive roof of green slates; it had wide, low mullioned casement windows, its rooms were eight feet high and its doors five foot seven, and all about it were enormous buttresses fit to sustain a castle. It had sun-traps and verandahs and a terrace, and it snuggled into the ruddy hillside and stared fatly out across the Weald from beyond Limpsfield, and it was quite a jolly little house to live in when you had learnt to be shorter than five feet seven inches and to dodge the low bits of ceiling and the beam over the ingle-nook.
And therein, to crown the work of the builder, Peter was born.
Peter’s mother came from quite a different strand in the complicated web of British life. Her “people”—she was brought up to call them that—were county people, but old-fashioned and prolific, and her father had been the sixth son of a third son and very lucky to get a living. He was the Vicar of Long Downport and an early widower; his two sons had gone to Oxford with scholarships, and Dolly had stayed at home, a leggy, dark-eyed girl with a sceptical manner, much given to reading history. One of her brothers passed from Oxford into the higher division of the Civil Service and went to India; the other took to scornful, reactionary journalism, dramatic criticism, musical comedy lyrics, parody, and drink—which indeed is almost a necessity if a man is to stick to reactionary journalism; this story will presently inherit Joan from him; she had a galaxy of cousins who were parsons, missionaries, schoolmasters, and soldiers; one was an explorer; not one was in business. Her father was a bookish inattentive man who had just missed a fellowship because of a general discursiveness; if he could have afforded it he would have been very liberal indeed in his theology; and, like grains of pepper amidst milder nourishment, there were all sorts of sceptical books about the house: Renan’s _Life of Christ_, Strauss’s _Life of Christ_, Gibbon, various eighteenth century memoirs, Huxley’s Essays, much Victor Hugo, and a “collected” Shelley, books that his daughter read with a resolute frown, sitting for the most part with one leg tucked up under her in the chair, her chin on her fists, and her elbows on either side of the volume undergoing assimilation.