Page:Tales of the long bow.pdf/288

 epic of our own Heptarchy, the story of our own dear little domestic war. 'The recent success of the agrarian protest'"

He was interrupted again by the arrival of two more guests; by the silent entrance of Colonel Crane and the very noisy entrance of Captain Pierce, who had brought his young wife with him from the country, for they had established themselves in the ancestral inn of the Blue Boar. White's wife was still in the country, and Crane's having long been busy in her studio with war-posters, was now equally busy with peace-posters.

Hood was one of those men whom books almost literally seize and swallow, like monsters with leather or paper jaws. It was no exaggeration to say he was deep in a book as an incautious traveller might be deep in a swamp or some strange man-eating plant of the tropics; only that the traveller was magnetized and did not even struggle. He would fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence and go on reading; or he would suddenly begin to read aloud with great passion, arguing with somebody in the book without any reference to anybody in the room. Though not normally rude, he would drift through other people's drawing-rooms towards other people's bookshelves and