“This pilgrimage of ours,” he said, presently, “has made for magnanimity. This day particularly has been a good day. When we stood on this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be standing outside myself in an immense still sphere of past and future. I stood with my feet upon the Stone Age and saw myself four thousand years away, and all my distresses as very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in London the case is altogether different; after three hours or so of the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed moment of personality. There is no past any longer, there is no future, there is only the rankling dispute. For all those three hours, perhaps, I have been thinking of just what I had to say, just how I had to say it, just how I looked while I said it, just how much I was making myself understood, how I might be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented, challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used up. At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting, pin-point of SELF.... One goes back to one’s home unable to recover. Fighting it over again. All night sometimes.... I get up and walk about the room and curse.... Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of mind to Westminster?” “When Westminster is as dead as Avebury,” said the doctor, unhelpfully. He added after some seconds, “Milton knew of these troubles. ‘Not without dust and heat’ he wrote--a great phrase.” “But the dust chokes me,” said Sir Richmond. He took up a copy of THE GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND that lay beside him on the table. But he did not open it. He held it in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all that evening. “I do not think that I shall stir up my motives any more for a time. Better to go on into the west country cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the past.” “I can prescribe nothing better,” said Dr. Martineau. “Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light on one or two of your minor entanglements.” “I don’t want to think of them,” said Sir Richmond. “Let me get right away from everything. Until my skin has grown again.” CHAPTER THE SIXTH THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE Section 1 Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over the downs round Avebury they went by way of Devizes and Netheravon and Amesbury to Stonehenge.