"Wait until you get to the woods! We're going to a place called Egypt. Don't you think that's romantic? Though it reminds me more of Oberon and Titania than of Anthony and Cleopatra." He looked blank, and she explained:-- "Shakespeare, you know." "I've never read Shakespeare." "Oh! you should." "I've tried, but I can't understand him. I suppose it's because I'm not English. It seems ridiculous to me, all those plots and murders." "But the fairies in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'!" "I haven't read it; but what do you want with fairies? A wood's a wood, and there's quite enough mystery in it for me without pretending to see things that aren't there." "But it's nice to pretend," said Clowes rather lamely, almost hating him because he seemed so wrong in the country. She knew people like that, people she was quite fond of in London, but in the country they were awful. The charabancs swung through Farnham Royal and they came in sight of the woods, brilliant under a vivid blue sky patched with huge, heavy white clouds. Birds hovered above the trees, and as they turned out of the street of seaside bungalows and along the sandy lane leading to Egypt, they put up rabbits and pheasants. The art students looked bizarre and almost theatrical in the woods, with the long-haired young men and the short-haired girls, many of them wearing the brightest colours. Mendel hated the lot of them, giggling girls and bouncing boys, and he recognized how inappropriate they all were and how he himself was the most inappropriate of them all. He felt ashamed, and wanted to go away and hide, to crawl away to some hole and gaze with his eyes at the beauty he could not feel. There were too many trees, as there were too many people. . . . What a poor thing is a man in a crowd which makes it impossible to share his thoughts and emotions with anyone! And how bitter it is when he is full of thoughts and emotions! It is all so bitter that the crowd must do foolish, inappropriate things not to feel it, not to be broken up by it. . . . Yet the others seemed happy enough. The old Professors were beaming and pretending to be young. Perhaps they enjoyed it more than anyone because they did not want to be alone, or to steal away with a coveted maid, as some of the young men were doing even now. . . . Had Mitchell stolen away with Morrison? Horrible idea! No. There he was, putting up stumps for cricket.