“And I simply can’t think,” said Lychnis, “why anybody ever does anything at all. Because really there are so many reasons against doing things—except, perhaps”—she pondered a little—“the things that bring you new and strange experiences, and those, after all, involve you in disappointment.” Quentin winked at her. “Ætherial Lychnis,” he replied. “You will soon be ready to join the gentlemen on the rock. As for me, I have been a man of action—muscular action. I am a motor man. Yet, to have you always near me, I will dissolve my fleshy substance, and consist of a vacancy that meditates on nothing. I’ll be no more than a large, empty shirt dreaming on a clothes-line. We’ll become sighing winds and mingle our particles. We’ll be two doctrines of inaction, inert in one another’s arms.” “Always sensual, Quentin,” she replied. By now they were at the edge of the deep forest that clothed the great flanks of the mountain. Out of the forest rose craggy peaks that they did not that day propose to climb. Lord Sombrewater, Sir Richard and Sprot were already spreading the lunch. The wind had died, and they sat in a thicket, listening to the last spasmodic sobs of the gale, and looking out under the leaves that protected them away down the mountain-side and across the glen they had traversed. Far down, one among many fantastic outcroppings and erections of rock, was the little mountain of meditation, and the dozen motionless figures could still be descried. Here were no pavilions or eaves of temples. They had come away, as it occurred to the mind of Ambrose to think, from the civilized and composed harmony of the Peach-blossom Valley to outer spaces undealt with by any ordering mind. “This is undoubtedly for Terence,” said Sir Richard. “This is untidy.” “And what do you think of it all, Fulke?” asked Lychnis. These were the first words she had spoken to him that day, and he brightened (unreasonably), as if he hoped she might love him, after all. Yet he couldn’t agree with her opinions. “I am with Ruby,” he said. “Men have no right to lie and dream about abstractions when there is so much ugliness and misery in the world. They ought to be building the New Jerusalem.” “In China’s green and pleasant land,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “Well, let ’em. We don’t want it in England.” “They’d have a better chance here,” retorted Fulke. “There’s no capitalist system here that must be destroyed before you can build. What lovely thing did the capitalist system ever produce, I ask?” “My daughter,” suggested Lord Sombrewater. “Very definitely, I think, it produced my daughter.” Fulke ignored that. It was, as Ambrose notes, one of those unfair arguments. “We could make England as lovely as this,” he said, “with a little preliminary destruction and the aid of science.” “Sheer, criminal balderdash!” exclaimed Sprot.