“Belt upon belt, the wooded dim Blue goodness of the weald.” “Is it not, Harilek? I know no other country save that of the Green Sakae, but I love this more than all I have seen. Is your country like this?” “My own is just like that part there under the hills. I might almost be looking at the landscape round my father’s house at home.” “You said your father was dead, or so my father told me. Who, then, holds his land? Have you an elder brother?” “No. I had only one brother, and he was killed during the war I spoke of. My sister, whose husband was also killed in the same war, lives there now while I am away.” “And you will go back some day, I suppose, and settle?” “Perhaps. When I grow too old to wander. But I shall not hurry back yet. I want to learn about your country first, and that will take a long time, I think.” “But does not your sister want you to come back and settle down and--look after the land?” “She has not said so, much. She has her two sons, one of whom is fifteen now, and presently he will be old enough to manage things if I am away. Not that she wants any help really”--and I smiled as I thought of Ethel’s masterful nature requiring any one to help her. “She has spent most of her life looking after my father, myself, my brother, and every one and everything else she has ever met,” I explained. “I do not think she wants much help. Like you, she thinks all men are babies.” “So they are,” said Aryenis defiantly. “Men never grow up, except when they go bad. Nice men never grow up, not properly, although they pretend to, and put on airs and speak gravely; feign to talk important secrets when we women aren’t there, and turn us out of council meetings; try to look impressive, and puff and blow if you ask them anything. But it’s all make-believe. In the things that really matter a man of fifty is no wiser than a boy of fifteen.” “What things?” said I, honestly seeking for knowledge. “Oh, lots of things, real ones; not playthings like bows or new ways of feathering arrows, or new kinds of bits for horses, with which men fill their heads and for which they invent weird new names that no one understands to make them sound important. But when it comes to the real things of life, they’re babies, just babies.” She flicked her mare with her switch as if she were endeavouring to drive knowledge into the heads of those undeveloped infantile beings, the nice members of the male sex. “But you haven’t made it clear what are the really important things,” I persisted. “I couldn’t make it clear, because, if I did you wouldn’t understand them, being a man.” “And hence a babe, I suppose?” “Certainly, a babe. Oh, undoubtedly a babe.” Then, completely off the point, “Do you know, Harilek, you haven’t asked after my shoulder for two days?” “I’m so sorry; how is it?” As a matter of fact I had asked Forsyth twice daily on the point, and knew that it was practically healed up.