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“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.”Would it be 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 really call it, for that matter, anything in the world we like–the thing for instance we love it most for being.”

“I know what I call it,” said Dane after a moment. Then as his friend listened with interest: “Just simply ‘The Great Good Place.’ “

“I see–what can you say more? I’ve put it to myself perhaps a little differently.” They sat there as innocently as small boys confiding to each other the names of toy animals.” ‘The Great Want Met.’ “

“Ah yes–that’s it!”

“Isn’t it enough for us that it’s a place carried on for our benefit so admirably that we strain our ears in vain for a creak of the machinery? Isn’t it enough for us that it’s simply a thorough hit?”

“Ah a hit!” Dane benignantly murmured.

“It does for us what it pretends to do,” his companion went on; “the mystery isn’t deeper than that. The thing’s probably simple enough in fact, and on a thoroughly practical basis; only it has had its origin in a splendid thought, in a real stroke of genius.”

“Yes,” Dane returned, “in a sense–on somebody or other’s part–so exquisitely personal!”

“Precisely–it rests, like all good things, on experience. The ‘great want’ comes home–that’s the great thing it does! On the day it came home to the right mind this dear place was constituted. It always moreover in the long run has been met–it always must be. How can it not require to be, more and more, as pressure of every sort grows?”

Dane, with his hands folded in his lap, took in these words of wisdom.”Pressure of every sort IS growing!” he placidly observed.

“I see well enough what that fact has done to you,” his Brother declared.

Dane smiled.”I couldn’t have borne it longer. I don’t know what would have become of me.”

“I know what would have become of me .”

“Well, it’s the same thing.”

“Yes,” said Dane’s companion, “it’s doubtless the same thing.” On which they sat in silence a little, seeming pleasantly to follow, in the view of the green garden, the vague movements of the monster–madness, surrender, collapse–they had escaped. Their bench was like a box at the opera.”And I may perfectly, you know,” the Brother pursued, “have seen you before. I may even have known you well. We don’t know.”

They looked at each other again serenely enough, and at last Dane said: “No, we don’t know.”

“That’s what I meant by our coming with our eyes closed. Yes–there’s something out. There’s a gap, a link missing, the great hiatus!” the Brother laughed.”It’s as simple a story as the old, old rupture–the break that lucky Catholics have always been able to make, that they’re still, with their innumerable religious houses, able to make, by going into ‘retreat.’ I don’t speak of the pious exercises–I speak only of the material simplification. I don’t speak of the putting off of one’s self; I speak only–if one has a self worth sixpence–of the getting it back. The place, the time, the way were, for those of the old persuasion, always there–are indeed practically there for them as much as ever. They can always get off–the blessed houses receive. So it was high time that we–we of the great Protestant peoples, still more, if possible, in the sensitive individual case, overscored and overwhelmed, still more congested with mere quantity and prostituted, through our ‘enterprise,’ to mere profanity–should learn how to get off, should find somewhere our retreat and remedy. There was such a huge chance for it!”