But our craving for quiet was not a desire to get out of earshot of the guns. It dated farther back than the War; it was the inevitable outcome of the over-wrought hurry of the twentieth century, when one’s nerves get so frazzled in the vain attempt to do everything, and do it all at once, that at last life is simply one intense longing for that “nest in the wilderness” out of reach of the clamour of the market-place and the vain, foolish, soul-wearing struggle for material things. In that enchanted period of life, known as “before the War,” we used often to discuss the desirability of moving to an uninhabited island and spending the rest of our days there in unalloyed peace. It had been an absorbing dream with me, ever since I first read Sarah Orne Jewett’s book, _The Country of the Pointed Firs_. I dare say it was selfish to think of being _quite_ out of reach of the noise and dirt and bustle and din of cities, and where there would be no next-door piano, and no gramophone in the house the other side, and no soots floating in the windows—but it was a very pleasant one, and I used to add to it occasionally by imagining what it would be like to wake up one morning and find that some unknown but generous friend had left me an uninhabited island as a legacy; one not far from the mainland, and somewhere around the British Isles, of course. When such a thing happens, it will find me quite prepared, for we have built the house there, and furnished it, and mapped out our life there many and many a time; all I am waiting for is—the island! That seems hard to come by! I’ve had one or two offered me (not as gifts, but to purchase), like Lundy, for instance, but they cost too much and are not uninhabited. So we have still to content ourselves with plans only. We were recalled to The Island (we always refer to it in capital letters) as we sat round the fire, by Virginia inquiring what books I should take with me when I moved there. She said she concluded that, being a booky sort of a person, a library would be an essential. But I set my face firmly against taking unnecessary literature. My house gets choked with books, ninety per cent. of which I never open a second time. I am for ever turning them out, and yet they go on accumulating. Virginia has a perfect mania for hoarding impossible books, that she could never find time to read through again if she lived to be the age of Methuselah; yet she keeps them all, on the chance that some day she may require to refer to a solitary sentence in one of them. Her cupboards are full, and her shelves are packed behind and before, and she has had sets of drawers made just to hold “papers”; which means hundredweights of abstruse pamphlets, and learned magazines, and cuttings—well, I dare say you know the sort of girl she is, and what it’s like when their flat gets spring-cleaned, and she insists that no one must lay a finger on _her_ books!