attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his life,
and more and more he turned from men to Nature.

Moreover, foolish as it must sound, I was sometimes aware that deep down
in him hid some nameless, indefinable quality that proclaimed him fitted
to live in conditions that had never known the restraints of modern
conventions--a very different thing to doing without them once known. A
kind of childlike, transcendental innocence he certainly possessed,
_naif_, most engaging, and--utterly impossible. It showed itself
indirectly, I think, in this distress under modern conditions. The
multifarious apparatus of the spirit of Today oppressed him; its rush and
luxury and artificiality harassed him beyond belief. The terror of cities
ran in his very blood.

When I describe him as something of an outcast, therefore, it will be
seen that he was such both voluntarily and involuntarily.

"What the world has gained by brains is simply nothing to what it has
lost by them--"

"A dream, my dear fellow, a mere dream," I stopped him, yet with
sympathy because I knew he found relief this way. "Your constructive
imagination is too active."

"By Gad," he replied warmly, "but there is a place somewhere, or a state
of mind--the same thing--where it's more than a dream. And, what's more,
bless your stodgy old heart, some day I'll get there."

"Not in England, at any rate," I suggested.