"I am not young. I mean I am past those hot and early years when
men play--Romeo. The dream that is mine is one which has come to a
man of thirty, who, having seen the world, has weighed it and
wants--something more.

"I have told you of my house in that hidden land which is washed by
the sea. I want to spend the rest of my days there, and I had hoped
that some woman might be found whose love of life, whose love of
adventure, whose love of me, might be so strong that she would see
nothing strange in my demand that she forsake all others and cleave
only to me.

"By forsaking all others, I mean, literally, what I say. I should
want to cut her off entirely from all former ties. To let any one
into our secret, to reveal that hidden land to a gaping world,
would be to destroy it. We should be followed, tracked by the
newspapers, written up, judged eccentric--mad. And I do not wish to
be judged at all. My separation from my kind would have in it more
than a selfish whim, an obsession for solitude. I want to get back
to primitive civilization. I want my children to face a simpler
world than the one I faced. Do you know what it means for a man to
inherit money, with nothing back of it for two generations but hard
work, although back of that there were, perhaps, kings? It means
that I had, unaided, to fit myself into a social scheme so complex
that I have not yet mastered its intricacies. I do not want to
master them. I do not want my sons to master them. I want them to
find life a thing of the day's work, the day's worship, the day's
out-of-door delights. I want them to have time to think and to
dream. And then some day they shall come back if they wish to