Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/18

10 they were all who would want it; though of these, no doubt—well, for reasons, for things that, in the world, he had observed—there would never be too many. Not all perhaps who wanted would really find; but none at least would find who didn't really want. And then what the need would have to have been first! What it at first had to be for himself! He felt afresh, in the light of his companion's face, what it might still be even when deeply satisfied, as well as what communication was established by the mere mutual knowledge of it.

'Every man must arrive by himself and on his own feet—isn't that so? We're brothers here for the time, as in a great monastery, and we immediately think of each other and recognise each other as such; but we must have first got here as we can, and we meet after long journeys by complicated ways. Moreover we meet—don't we?—with closed eyes.'

'Ah, don't speak as if we were dead!' Dane laughed.

'I shan't mind death if it's like this,' his friend replied.

It was too obvious, as Dane gazed before him, that one wouldn't; but after a moment he asked, with the first articulation, as yet, of his most elementary wonder: 'Where is it?'

'I shouldn't be surprised if it were much nearer than one ever suspected.'

'Nearer town, do you mean?'

'Nearer everything—nearer every one.'

George Dane thought. 'Somewhere, for instance, down in Surrey?'

His Brother met him on this with a shade of reluctance. 'Why should we call it names? It must have a climate, you see.'

'Yes,' Dane happily mused; 'without that!' All it so securely did have overwhelmed him again, and he couldn't help breaking out: What is it?'

'Oh, it's positively a part of our ease and our rest and our change, I think, that we don't at all know and that we may