imagination. For no man, they argued, not even
father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the
novelist's art of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with
real trunks for a voyage _au pays du reve_.

As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful
nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled
its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the
parched fields. A pearly blur settled over them, and a light sifted of
all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the
splendour of unveiled skies. All unconscious of going towards the very
scenes of war, I carried off in my eye, this tiny fragment of Great
Britain; a few fields, a wooded rise; a clump of trees or two, with a
short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled
roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. And I
felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a
beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an
inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a
woman is conquered--by love, which is a sort of surrender.

These were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in
hand, which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And I am
certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble
but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The forms and
the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not
their conquest--which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the most
precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness rather than
possessed by you. Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway
carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt
more and more plainly, that what I had started on was a journey in time,
into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent, but to
him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and
continuity of his life--so that at times it presented itself to his
conscience as a series of betrayals--still more dreadful.

I down here these thoughts so exclusively personal, to explain why there
was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war. I
don't mean to say that I ignored the possibility; I simply did not think
of it. And it made no difference; for if I