“And what is that?” said he.

“Why,” said I, “to enjoy the illusion that Change can somewhere be arrested, and that, in some shape, a part at least of the things we love remains.  For, since I was a boy and almost since I can remember, everything in this house has been the same; and here I escape from the threats of the society we know.”

When I had said this, he was grave and silent for a little while; and then he answered: 

“It is impossible, I think, after many years to recover any such illusion.  Just as a young man can no longer think himself (as children do) the actor in any drama of his own choosing, so a man growing old (as am I) can no longer expect of any society—­and least of all of his own—­the gladness that comes from an illusion of permanence.”

“For my part,” I answered in turn, “I know very well, though I can conjure up this feeling of security, that it is very flimsy stuff; and I take it rather as men take symbols.  For though these good people will at last perish, and some brewer—­a Colonel of Volunteers as like as not—­will buy this little field, and though for the port we are drinking there will be imperial port, and for the beer we have just drunk something as noisome as that port, and though thistles will grow up in the good pasture ground, and though, in a word, this inn will become a hotel and will perish, nevertheless I cannot but believe that England remains, and I do not think it the taking of a drug or a deliberate cheating of oneself to come and steep one’s soul in what has already endured so long because it was proper to our country.”

“All that you say,” he answered, “is but part of the attempt to escape Necessity.  Your very frame is of that substance for which permanence means death; and every one of all the emotions that you know is of its nature momentary, and must be so if it is to be alive.”

“Yet there is a divine thirst,” I said, “for something that will not so perish.  If there were no such thirst, why should you and I debate such things, or come here to The Lion either of us, to taste antiquity?  And if that thirst is there, it is a proof that there is for us some End and some such satisfaction.  For my part, as I know of nothing else, I cannot but seek it in this visible good world.  I seek it in Sussex, in the nature of my home, and in the tradition of my blood.”

But he answered:  “No; it is not thus to be attained, the end of which you speak.  And that thirst, which surely is divine, is to be quenched in no stream that we can find by journeying, not even in the little rivers that run here under the combes of home.”

MYSELF:  “Well, then, what is the End?”

HE:  “I have sometimes seen it clearly, that when the disappointed quest was over, all this journeying would turn out to be but the beginning of a much greater adventure, and that I should set out towards another place where every sense should be fulfilled, and where the fear of mutation should be set at rest.”