He marched twice the length of the garden without seeing so much as a flower before he noticed what he was doing and took himself in hand: Sit down, have a smoke, and enjoy the place by daylight, he ordered himself. You won’t get to Bunsen any faster by champing at the bit. He spotted a stone bench tucked beneath the white rose along the wall, and sat there. From that angle, he noticed that the house, its garden, and the stream below seemed to have an almost mathematical relationship, as if it had been laid out according to some Golden Mean: x to y; house to wall; wall to stream; height of house to height of wall and height of ridge behind. The result might have been cold and inhuman but for the warm color of the stones used, the naturalness of the setting, and the enormous rambling rose behind him, its green expanse revealing glimpses of a central trunk as thick as Stuyvesant’s forearm. Before half the cigarette was gone, Sarah came out of the house. He rose, but seeing her hand go up, he stayed where he was, enjoying the sight of her trotting down the steps and along the paths towards him.
