. About half the intellectual effort which is needed to review
a book of modern poetry has enabled me to get together seven or eight
people, of opposite sexes, at the same spot at the same hour on the same
day. What else is generalship, Hirst? What more did Wellington do on the
field of Waterloo? It's like counting the number of pebbles of a path,
tedious but not difficult."

He was sitting in his bedroom, one leg over the arm of the chair, and
Hirst was writing a letter opposite. Hirst was quick to point out that
all the difficulties remained.

"For instance, here are two women you've never seen. Suppose one of them
suffers from mountain-sickness, as my sister does, and the other--"

"Oh, the women are for you," Hewet interrupted. "I asked them solely for
your benefit. What you want, Hirst, you know, is the society of young
women of your own age. You don't know how to get on with women, which is
a great defect, considering that half the world consists of women."

Hirst groaned that he was quite aware of that.

But Hewet's complacency was a little chilled as he walked with Hirst to
the place where a general meeting had been appointed. He wondered why
on earth he had asked these people, and what one really expected to get
from bunching human beings up together.

"Cows," he reflected, "draw together in a field; ships in a calm; and
we're just the same when we've nothing else to do. But why do we do
it?--is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of things"
(he stopped by a stream and began stirring it with his walking-stick
and clouding the water with mud), "making cities and mountains and whole
universes out of nothing, or do we really love each other, or do we,
on the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, knowing
nothing, leaping from moment to moment as from world to world?--which
is, on the whole, the view _I_ incline to."

He jumped over the stream; Hirst went round and joined him, remarking
that he had long ceased to look for the reason of any human action.

Half a mile further, they came to a group of plane trees and the
salmon-pink farmhouse standing by the stream which had been chosen as
meeting-place. It was a shady spot, lying conveniently just where the
hill sprung out from the flat. Between the thin stems of the plane trees
the young men could see little knots of donkeys pasturing, and a tall
woman rubbing the nose of one of them, while another woman was kneeling
by the strea