re our children are men,
these parts which survive from a better order will be accepted as
models, and England will be built again."

This fantasy had not time, tenuous as it was, to disappear, before there
came into that room a man whose gesture and bearing promised him to be
an excellent companion, but in whose eyes I also perceived some light
not ordinary. He was of middle age, fifty or more; his hair was crisp
and grey, his face brown, as though he had been much upon the sea. He
was tall in stature, and of some strength. He saluted me, and, when he
had eaten, asked me if I also were familiar with this inn.

"Very familiar," I said; "and since I can enter it at any hour freely,
it is now more familiar to me even than the houses that were once my
homes. For nowadays we, who work in the State and are not idle, must be
driven from one place to another; and only the very rich have certitude
and continuity. But to them it is of no service; for they are too idle
to take root in the soil."

"Yet I was of their blood," he said; "and there is in this county a home
which should be mine. But nothing to-day is capable of endurance. I have
not seen my home (though it is but ten miles from here) since I left it
in my thirtieth year; and I too would rather come to this inn, which I
know as you know it, than to any house in England; because I am certain
of entry, and because I know what I shall find, and because what I find
is what any man of this county should find, if the soul of it is not to
disappear."

"You, then," I answered (we were now seated side by side before the fire
with but one flickering candle behind us, and on the floor between us a
port just younger than the host), "you, then, come here for much the
same reason as do I?"

"And what is that?" said he.

"Why," said I, "to enjoy the illusion that Change can somewhere be
arrested, and that, in some shape, a part at least of the things we love
remains. For, since I was a boy and almost since I can remember,
everything in this house has been the same; and here I escape from the
threats of the society we know."

When I had said this, he was grave and silent for a little while; and
then he answered:

"It is impossible, I think, after many years to recover any such
illusion. Just as a young man can no longer think himself (as children
do) the actor in any drama of his own choosing, so a man growing old (as
am I) can no longer expect of any society--and least of al