“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “people can travel.”

“But that isn’t real happening,” said Cecily.

“It keeps one interested.”

“But real happening is doing something.”

“You come back to that,” said Mr. Direck.  “I never met any one before who’d quite got that spirit as you have it.  I wouldn’t alter it.  It’s part of you.  It’s part of this place.  It’s what Mr. Britling always seems to be saying and never quite knowing he’s said it.  It’s just as though all the things that are going on weren’t the things that ought to be going on—­but something else quite different.  Somehow one falls into it.  It’s as if your daily life didn’t matter, as if politics didn’t matter, as if the King and the social round and business and all those things weren’t anything really, and as though you felt there was something else—­out of sight—­round the corner—­that you ought to be getting at.  Well, I admit, that’s got hold of me too.  And it’s all mixed up with my idea of you.  I don’t see that there’s really a contradiction in it at all.  I’m in love with you, all my heart’s in love with you, what’s the good of being shy about it?  I’d just die for your littlest wish right here now, it’s just as though I’d got love in my veins instead of blood, but that’s not taking me away from that other thing.  It’s bringing me round to that other thing.  I feel as if without you I wasn’t up to anything at all, but with you—­We’d not go settling down in a cottage or just touring about with a Baedeker Guide or anything of that kind.  Not for long anyhow.  We’d naturally settle down side by side and do ...”

“But what should we do?” asked Cecily.

There came a hiatus in their talk.

Mr. Direck took a deep breath.

“You see that old felled tree there.  I was sitting on it the day before yesterday and thinking of you.  Will you come there and sit with me on it?  When you sit on it you get a view, oh! a perfectly lovely English view, just a bit of the house and those clumps of trees and the valley away there with the lily pond.  I’d love to have you in my memory of it....”

They sat down, and Mr. Direck opened his case.  He was shy and clumsy about opening it, because he had been thinking dreadfully hard about it, and he hated to seem heavy or profound or anything but artless and spontaneous to Cecily.  And he felt even when he did open his case that the effect of it was platitudinous and disappointing.  Yet when he had thought it out it had seemed very profound and altogether living.

“You see one doesn’t want to use terms that have been used in a thousand different senses in any way that isn’t a perfectly unambiguous sense, and at the same time one doesn’t want to seem to be canting about things or pitching anything a note or two higher than it ought legitimately to go, but it seems to me that this sort of something that Mr. Britling is always asking for in his essays