“Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that joy is of all gifts the most divine.  And when I left London, abandoned my career, such as it was, I did so because I intended to devote my life to the cultivation of joy, and, by continuous and unsparing effort, to be happy.  Among people, and in constant intercourse with others, I did not find it possible; there were too many distractions in towns and work-rooms, and also too much suffering.  So I took one step backwards or forwards, as you may choose to put it, and went straight to Nature, to trees, birds, animals, to all those things which quite clearly pursue one aim only, which blindly follow the great native instinct to be happy without any care at all for morality, or human law or divine law.  I wanted, you understand, to get all joy first-hand and unadulterated, and I think it scarcely exists among men; it is obsolete.”

Darcy turned in his chair.

“Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?” he asked.  “Food, food and mating.”

Frank laughed gently in the stillness.

“Do not think I became a sensualist,” he said.  “I did not make that mistake.  For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him.  I may be mad, it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that.  No, what is it that makes puppies play with their own tails, that sends cats on their prowling ecstatic errands at night?”.

He paused a moment.

“So I went to Nature,” he said.  “I sat down here in this New Forest, sat down fair and square, and looked.  That was my first difficulty, to sit here quiet without being bored, to wait without being impatient, to be receptive and very alert, though for a long time nothing particular happened.  The change in fact was slow in those early stages.”

“Nothing happened?” asked Darcy rather impatiently, with the sturdy revolt against any new idea which to the English mind is synonymous with nonsense.  “Why, what in the world should happen?”

Now Frank as he had known him was the most generous but most quick-tempered of mortal men; in other words his anger would flare to a prodigious beacon, under almost no provocation, only to be quenched again under a gust of no less impulsive kindliness.  Thus the moment Darcy had spoken, an apology for his hasty question was half-way up his tongue.  But there was no need for it to have traveled even so far, for Frank laughed again with kindly, genuine mirth.

“Oh, how I should have resented that a few years ago,” he said.  “Thank goodness that resentment is one of the things I have got rid of.  I certainly wish that you should believe my story—­in fact, you are going to—­but that you at this moment should imply that you do not, does not concern me.”

“Ah, your solitary sojournings have made you inhuman,” said Darcy, still very English.