Hood was one of those men whom books almost literally seize and swallow, like monsters with leather or paper jaws. It was no exaggeration to say he was deep in a book as an incautious traveller might be deep in a swamp or some strange man-eating plant of the tropics; only that the traveller was magnetized and did not even struggle. He would fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence and go on reading; or he would suddenly begin to read aloud with great passion, arguing with somebody in the book without any reference to anybody in the room. Though not normally rude, he would drift through other people’s drawing-rooms towards other people’s bookshelves and disappear into them, so to speak, like a rusty family ghost. He would travel a hundred miles to see a friend for an hour, and then waste half an hour with his head in some odd volume he never happened to have seen before. On all that side of him there was a sort of almost creepy unconsciousness. His wife, who had old-world notions of the graces of a hostess, sometimes had double work to do. “The recent success of the agrarian protest,” began Hood cheerfully as his wife rose swiftly to receive two more visitors. These were Professor Green and Commander Bellew Blair; for a queer friendship had long linked together the most practical and the most unpractical of the brothers of the Long Bow. The friendship, as Pierce remarked, was firmly rooted in the square root of minus infinity. “How beautiful your garden is looking,” said Blair to his hostess. “One so seldom sees flower-beds like that now; but I shall always think the old gardeners were right.” “Most things are old-fashioned here, I’m afraid,” replied Elizabeth, “but I always like them like that. And how are the children?” “The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked her husband in a clear voice, “is doubtless----” “Really,” she said, laughing, “you are too ridiculous for anything. Why in the world should you want to read out the history of the war to the people who were in it, and know quite well already what really happened?” “I beg your pardon,” said Colonel Crane. “Very improper to contradict a lady, but indeed you are mistaken. The very last thing the soldier generally knows is what has really happened. Has to look at a newspaper next morning for the realistic description of what never happened.” “Why, then you’d better go on reading, Hood,” said Hilary Pierce. “The Colonel wants to know whether he was killed in battle; or whether there was any truth in that story that he was hanged as a spy on the very tree he had climbed when running away as a deserter.” “Should rather like to know what they make of it all,” said the Colonel. “After all, we were all too deep in it to see it. I mean see it as a whole.” “If Owen once begins he won’t stop for hours,” said the lady. “Perhaps,” began Blair, “we had better----”