mellow, as though he had been a mellow baby born into a mellow class, a
ripe and juicy little boy. One could see, even before he mentioned it,
that he had gone to an ivy-clad public school in its anecdotage, with
magnificent traditions, aristocratic associations, and no chemical
laboratories, and proceeded thence to a venerable college in the very
ripest Gothic. Few books he had younger than a thousand years; of these,
Yarrow and Ellis and good pre-Methodist sermons made the bulk. He was a
man of moderate height, a little shortened in appearance by his
equatorial dimensions, and a face that had been mellow from the first
was now climacterically ripe. The beard of a David hid his redundancy of
chin; he wore no watch chain out of refinements and his modest clerical
garments were made by a West End tailor.... And he sat with a hand on
either shin, blinking at his village in beatific approval. He waved a
plump palm towards it. His burthen sang out again. What more could any
one desire?

"We are fortunately situated," he said, putting the thing tamely.

"We are in a fastness of the hills," he expanded.

He explained himself at length. "We are out of it all."

For they had been talking, he and his friend, of the Horrors of the Age,
of Democracy, and Secular Education, and Sky Scrapers, and Motor Cars,
and the American Invasion, the Scrappy Reading of the Public, and the
disappearance of any Taste at all.

"We are out of it all," he repeated, and even as he spoke the footsteps
of some one coming smote upon his ear, and he rolled over and regarded
her.