“I see the day coming,” said Quentin, “when some mechanico-scientific bloke will pull the universe to pieces just to see if he can reassemble it. I hate you people who are always poking in the works. Everyone does it now. People buy cars. Do they drive them? No. They spread them out on the lawn. Do people listen-in? Never. They muck about with the valves. There is no art; there is only psycho-analysis. We pull up all our flowers nowadays to examine the root-hairs and the system of water-absorption. The wonders of the deep have vanished since we took to dredging the Pacific. There’s no universe left; there’s only a shedful of spare parts. I am the only child of Nature now living.” “A child, yes,” said Sir Richard, “and ungoverned, save by whim. Spontaneous as a jet of spring water, but every wind blows you towards a new quarter. You are a man without self-direction. You cleave where your desire leads you.” “I was wrong,” said Quentin gaily, “when I said that I was the only child of Nature living. Here are a dozen others.” They had come down between overhanging rocks from a considerable height of crag into a glen full of small pines and boulders, and before them stood a great hump of mountain range and wind-tossed forest. On their right hand was a little stony hill with small bushes on it and an arbour, or summer-house. A stream—or, rather, a kind of flowing moat—surrounded it. And in the arbour, or under the bushes, or by the stream were men—men in mandarin robes—engaged, all of them (save two, who were chatting mirthfully by the stream), in a meditation that seemed characterized by an expression of hilarious vacuity. Some had long black moustaches, others scanty white beards. All had their hands folded in their sleeves, and all had a look—a look of youth, that, as Lychnis said, was most unsuitable and monkey-like on their wizened faces. The party filed by the little mountain of meditation, glancing sideways, but no one of its strange inhabitants took any notice of them at all, even though Sprot went close up and peered at them across the stream (without making any intelligent observation), as if they were inhabitants of the Mappin Terraces. “Wizards,” whispered Lychnis—“or Sages.” “Wizards, Adepts, Rishi,” her father replied. “The sort of thing Blackwood tries to be. Extreme cases of Blackwood.” “I think not,” put in Quentin. “Taoists, I fancy, not Buddhists. There are fundamental differences.” “Lunatics, if I may be allowed an opinion,” said Sprot—“from the local asylum. Blackwood ought to be with them.” He grew warm. “I call it preposterous that grown men should be allowed to sit all day on a rock, grinning. They ought to have something better to do.” “It is unpractical, isn’t it?” observed Ruby. “I despise men who don’t do something.”