I told her that I concluded I would try literature, but before writing anything I would read a bit more.

It was a Saturday, so Jimson came back from town in the early afternoon.  He was a managing clerk in some shipping office, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his appearance.  His city clothes were loose dark-grey flannels, a soft collar, an orange tie, and a soft black hat.  His wife went down the road to meet him, and they returned hand-in-hand, swinging their arms like a couple of schoolchildren.  He had a skimpy red beard streaked with grey, and mild blue eyes behind strong glasses.  He was the most friendly creature in the world, full of rapid questions, and eager to make me feel one of the family.  Presently he got into a tweed Norfolk jacket, and started to cultivate his garden.  I took off my coat and lent him a hand, and when he stopped to rest from his labours—­which was every five minutes, for he had no kind of physique—­he would mop his brow and rub his spectacles and declaim about the good smell of the earth and the joy of getting close to Nature.

Once he looked at my big brown hands and muscular arms with a kind of wistfulness.  ‘You are one of the doers, Mr Brand,’ he said, ’and I could find it in my heart to envy you.  You have seen Nature in wild forms in far countries.  Some day I hope you will tell us about your life.  I must be content with my little corner, but happily there are no territorial limits for the mind.  This modest dwelling is a watch-tower from which I look over all the world.’

After that he took me for a walk.  We met parties of returning tennis-players and here and there a golfer.  There seemed to be an abundance of young men, mostly rather weedy-looking, but with one or two well-grown ones who should have been fighting.  The names of some of them Jimson mentioned with awe.  An unwholesome youth was Aronson, the great novelist; a sturdy, bristling fellow with a fierce moustache was Letchford, the celebrated leader-writer of the Critic.  Several were pointed out to me as artists who had gone one better than anybody else, and a vast billowy creature was described as the leader of the new Orientalism in England.  I noticed that these people, according to Jimson, were all ‘great’, and that they all dabbled in something ‘new’.  There were quantities of young women, too, most of them rather badly dressed and inclining to untidy hair.  And there were several decent couples taking the air like house-holders of an evening all the world Over.  Most of these last were Jimson’s friends, to whom he introduced me.  They were his own class—­modest folk, who sought for a coloured background to their prosaic city lives and found it in this odd settlement.

At supper I was initiated into the peculiar merits of Biggleswick.

‘It is one great laboratory of thought,’ said Mrs Jimson.  ’It is glorious to feel that you are living among the eager, vital people who are at the head of all the newest movements, and that the intellectual history of England is being made in our studies and gardens.  The war to us seems a remote and secondary affair.  As someone has said, the great fights of the world are all fought in the mind.’