And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were
excited. It's no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. The day
of departure had come, the very hour had struck. The luggage was coming
downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland then, if erased from the
map, yet existed in reality; it was not a mere _pays du reve_, where you
can travel only in imagination. For no man, they argued, not even
father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the
novelist's art of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with
real trunks for a voyage _au pays du reve_.

As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful
nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled
its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the
parched fields. A pearly blur settled over them, and a light sifted of
all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the
splendour of unveiled skies. All unconscious of going towards the very
scenes of war, I carried off in my eye, this tiny fragment of Great
Britain; a few fields, a wooded rise; a clump of trees or two, with a
short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled
roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I
felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a
beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an
inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a
woman is conquered--by love, which is a sort of surrender.

These were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in
hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And I am
certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble
but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The forms and
the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not