‘Now, really,’ he thought, ‘what a simple and charming woman! How her eyes twinkled! And how awfully nice her voice was!’ He flung down the rugs and wands and tea-cosy in the hall. ‘Out there,’ with a jerk in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean, ‘the whole camp would make her a Queen.’ Altogether the excitement of the last hour had been considerable. He felt that something must happen to him unless he could calm down a bit. ‘I know,’ he exclaimed aloud, ‘I’ll go and have a hot bath. There’s just time before dinner. That’ll take it out of me.’ And he went up the front stairs, singing like a boy. CHAPTER X Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.—BLAKE. For some days after that Paul walked on air. Incredible as it may seem to normally constituted persons, he was so delighted to have found a medium in which he could in some measure express himself without fear of ridicule, that the entire world was made anew for him. He thought about it a great deal. He even argued in his muddled fashion, but he got no farther that way. The only thing he really understood was the plain fact that he had found a region where his companions were about his own age, with his own tastes, ready to consider things that were _real_, and to let the trivial and vulgar world go by. This was the fact that stared him in the face and made him happy. For the first time in his life he could play with others. Hitherto he had played alone. ‘It’s a safety-valve at last,’ he exclaimed, using his favourite word. ‘Now I can let myself go a bit. _They_ will never laugh; on the contrary, they’ll understand and love it. Hooray!’ ‘And, remember,’ Nixie had again explained to him, ‘you have to write down all the aventures. That’s what keeping the records means. And you must read them out to us at the Meetings.’ And he chuckled as he thought about it, for it meant having real Reports to write at last, reports that others would read and appreciate. The aventures, moreover, began very quickly; they came thick and fast; and he lived in them so intensely that he carried them over into his other dull world, and sometimes hardly knew which world he was in at all. His imagination, hungry and untamed, had escaped, and was seeking all it could devour. It was a hot afternoon in mid-June, and Paul was lying with his pipe upon the lawn. His sister was out driving. He was alone with the children and the smaller portion of the menagerie,—smaller in size, that is, not in numbers; cats, kittens, and puppies were either asleep, or on the hunt, all about them. And from an open window a parrot was talking ridiculously in mixed French and English. The giant cedars spread their branches; in the limes the bees hummed drowsily; the world lay a scented garden around him, and a very soft wind stole to and fro, stirring the bushes with sleepy murmurs and making the flowers nod.