se to
Nature.

Once he looked at my big brown hands and muscular arms with a kind of
wistfulness. 'You are one of the doers, Mr Brand,' he said, 'and I
could find it in my heart to envy you. You have seen Nature in wild
forms in far countries. Some day I hope you will tell us about your
life. I must be content with my little corner, but happily there are no
territorial limits for the mind. This modest dwelling is a watch-tower
from which I look over all the world.'

After that he took me for a walk. We met parties of returning
tennis-players and here and there a golfer. There seemed to be an
abundance of young men, mostly rather weedy-looking, but with one or
two well-grown ones who should have been fighting. The names of some of
them Jimson mentioned with awe. An unwholesome youth was Aronson, the
great novelist; a sturdy, bristling fellow with a fierce moustache was
Letchford, the celebrated leader-writer of the Critic. Several were
pointed out to me as artists who had gone one better than anybody else,
and a vast billowy creature was described as the leader of the new
Orientalism in England. I noticed that these people, according to
Jimson, were all 'great', and that they all dabbled in something 'new'.
There were quantities of young women, too, most of them rather badly
dressed and inclining to untidy hair. And there were several decent
couples taking the air like house-holders of an evening all the world
Over. Most of these last were Jimson's friends, to whom he introduced
me. They were his own class--modest folk, who sought for a coloured
background to their prosaic city lives and found it in this odd
settlement.

At supper I was initiated into the peculiar merits of Biggleswick.

'It is one great laboratory of thought,' said Mrs Jimson. 'It is
glorious to feel that you are living among the eager, vital people who
are at the head of all the newest movements, and that the intellectual
history of England is being made in our studies and gardens. The war to
us seems a remote and secondary affair. As someone has said, the great
fights of the world are all fought in the mind.'

A spasm of pain crossed her husband's face. 'I wish I could feel it far
away. After all, Ursula, it is the sacrifice of the young that gives
people like us leisure and peace to think. Our duty is to do the best
which is permitted to us, but that duty is a poor thing compared with
what our young soldiers are giving! I may be quite wrong abo