At this time I was leading the procession (by some accident of the start from the bun shop) and had general orders to go straight ahead unless signalled to from the rear. I went, accordingly, straight ahead down a road running along a high ridge, the blank space of rain and mist on either side filled in no doubt on more propitious days by a good view. Bodiam lay below somewhere in the flat, and we were going there; for Mrs. Menzies-Legh, and indeed all the others including Edelgard, wished (or pretended to wish) to see the ruins. I must decline to believe in the genuineness of such a wish when expressed, as in this case, by the hungry and the wet. Ruins are very well, no doubt, but they do come last. A man will not look at a ruin if he is honest until every other instinct, even the smallest, has been satisfied. If, not having had his dinner, he yet expresses eagerness to visit such things, then I say that that man is a hypocrite. To enjoy looking at the roofless must you not first have a roof yourself? To enjoy looking at the empty must you not first be filled? For the roofless and the empty to visit and admire other roofless and other empties seems to me as barren as for ghosts to go to tea with ghosts. Alone I trudged through a dripping world. My thoughts from ruins and ghosts strayed naturally--for when you are seventy there must be a good deal of the ghost about you--once more to Lord Sigismund’s august and aged Aunt in Thuringia, to the almost invitation (certainly encouragement) he had given me to go and behold her in princely gaiters, to the many distinct advantages of having such a lady on our visiting list, to conjecture as to the extent of the Duke her brother’s hospitality should we go down and take up our abode very openly at the inn at his gates, to the pleasantness (apart from every other consideration) of staying in his castle after staying in a caravan, and to the interest of Storchwerder when it heard of it. The hooting of a yet invisible motor interrupted these musings. It was hidden in the mist at first, but immediately loomed into view, coming down the straight road toward me at a terrific pace, coming along with a rush and a roar, the biggest, swiftest, and most obviously expensive example I had yet seen. The road was wide, but sloped away considerably on either side from the crown of it, and on the crown of it I walked with my caravan. It was a clay road, made slippery by the rain; did these insolent vulgarians, I asked myself, suppose I was going to slide down one side in order to make room for them? Room there was plenty between me in the middle and the gutter and hedge at the sides. If there was to be sliding, why should it not be they who slid?