“Not now,” he said eagerly. “Maybe in the old days when you had pilgrims and ballad-makers and highwaymen and mail-coaches on the road. But not now. Nothing comes here but motorcars full of fat women, who stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the spring, and the shooting tenants in August. There is not much material to be got out of that. I want to see life, to travel the world, and write things like Kipling and Conrad. But the most I’ve done yet is to get some verses printed in Chambers’s Journal .”

I looked at the inn standing golden in the sunset against the brown hills.

“I’ve knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn’t despise such a hermitage. D’you think that adventure is found only in the tropics or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you’re rubbing shoulders with it at this moment.”

“That’s what Kipling says,” he said, his eyes brightening, and he quoted some verse about “Romance bringing up the 9:15.”