So year followed year in healthy and happy order. The first year the rock garden got laid down and the little bulbs and alpine plants set out. Hollyhocks were sown all over the place, against the house and beside the fences. By the next year they were blooming in gay profusion. It was marvellous how short a time it took. That second year he built the studio in the barn, doing most of the work with his own hands, with only the simple assistance of the hired man. The third year—the children were growing up now; they grow fast in the country—he got the swimming-pool begun. The fourth year it was finished. Meanwhile he was busy on his play, but it went slowly because there was so much else that had to be done.
The fifth year—well, one did miss the city sometimes. They would never think of going back there to This place was wonderful, except for three months in the winter. So this year they were moving in and taking an apartment for the three bad months. Grace, of course, loved music and missed the opera, while he liked the theatre, and it would be good to have again the companionship of certain people whom they knew. That was the greatest handicap of country life—the natives made fine neighbours, but one sometimes missed the intellectual stimulus of city life. And so this year he had decided to take the old girl in. They’d see the shows and hear the music andrenew their acquaintance with old friends and find out what was going on. They might even run down to Bermuda for three weeks in February. Or to Haiti. That was a place, he’d heard, that modern life had hardly touched. They had windmills and went in for voodoo worship. It was all savage and most primitively colourful. It would get them out of the rut to go off somewhere on a trip. Of course they’d be back in the country by the first of April.
Such was the fugitive pattern in one of its most common manifestations. But it also took other forms. The American expatriates who had taken up residence in Europe were essentially the same kind of people, though theirs was a more desolate and more embittered type of escapism. George Webber had known them in Paris, in Switzerland, and here in England, and it seemed to him that they represented one of the extremest breeds among the race of futilitarians. These were the Americans who had gone beyond even the pretence of being nature-lovers and earth-discoverers and returners to the simple life of native virtue in rural Yankeedom. These were the ones to whom nothing was left except an encyclopedic sneer—a sneer at everything American. It was a sneer which was derived from what they had read, from what others had said, or from some easy rationalization of self-defence. It was a sneer that did not have in it the sincerity of passion or the honesty of true indignation, and it became feebler year after year. For these people had nothing left but drink and sneering, the dreary round of cafe life with its repetition of racked saucers—nothing left but a blurred vision of the world, a sentimental fantasy of “Paris”, or of “England”, or of “Europe”, which was as unreal as if all their knowledge had been drawn from the pages of a fairy-tale, and as if they had never set foot upon these shores which they professed to understand so well and to cherish so devotedly.