'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