"Ah, that is all very good," he said at last, "but you must not be in any hurry; it is a great thing that ideas should dawn upon us gradually--one gets the full truth of them so. It was the hurry of life which was so bewildering--the shocks, the surprises, the ugly reflections of one's conduct that one saw in other lives--the corners one had to turn. Things, indeed, come suddenly even here, but one is led up to them gently enough; allowed to enter the sea for oneself, not soused and ducked in it. You will need all the strength you can store up for what is before you, and I can see in your face that you are storing up strength--but the weariness is not quite gone out of your mind." He was silent for a little, musing, till I said, "Will you not tell me some of your own adventures? I am sure from your look that you have them; and you are a pilgrim, it seems. Where are you bound?" "Oh," he said lightly, "I am not one of the people who have adventures--just the journey and the talk beside the way." "But," I said, "I have seen some others like you, and I am puzzled about it. You seem, if I may say so--I do not mean anything disrespectful or impertinent--to be like the gipsies whom one meets in quiet country places, with a secret knowledge of their own, a pride too great to be worth expressing, not anxious about life, not weary or dissatisfied, caring not for localities or possessions, but with a sort of eager pleasure in freedom and movement." He laughed. "Yes," he said, "you are right! I am no doubt a sort of nomad, as you say, detached from life perhaps. I don't know that it is desirable; there is a great deal to be said for living in the same place and loving the same things. Most people are happier so, and learn what they have to learn in that manner." "Yes," I said, "that is true and beautiful--the same old house, the same trees and pastures, the stream and the water-plants that hide it, the blue hills beyond the nearer wood--the dear familiar things; but even so the road which passes through the fields, over the bridge, up the covert-side ... it leads somewhere, and the heart on sunny days leaps up to follow it! Talking with you here, I feel a hunger for something wider and more free; your voice has the sound of the wind, with the secret knowledge of strange hill-tops and solitary seas! Sometimes the heart settles down upon what it knows and loves, but sometimes it reaches out to all the love and beauty hidden in the world, and in the waters beyond the world, and would embrace it all if it could. The faces one sees as one passes through unfamiliar cities or villages, how one longs to talk, to question, to ask what gave them the look they wear.... And you, if I may say it, seem to have passed beyond the need of wanting or desiring anything ... but I must not talk thus to a stranger; you must forgive me."