Dangelis belonged to quite a different type of trans-Atlantic visitor, from the kind that hover with exuberant delight over everything that is “old” or “English” or “European.” He was essentially rather an artist than an antiquary, rather an energetic workman than an epicurean sentimentalist. Once out of sight of the Elizabethan pile, the curious chill passed from his mind, and as he approached the first cottages of the village he looked round for more reassuring tokens. Such tokens were not lacking. They crowded in upon him, indeed, from every side. Stopping for a moment, ere the houses actually blocked his view, and leaning over a gate which faced westward, Dangelis looked out across the great Somersetshire plain, to which Leo’s Hill and Nevilton Mount serve the office of watchful sentinels. Tall, closely-clipped elm-trees, bordering every field, gave the country on this side of the horizon, a queer artificial look, as if it had been one huge landscape-garden, arranged according to the arbitrary pleasure of some fantastic artist, whose perversion it was to reduce every natural extravagance to the meticulous rhythm of his own formal taste. This impression, the impression of something willed and intentional in the very formation of Nature, gave our eccentric onlooker a caressing and delicate pleasure, a sense as of a thing peculiarly harmonious to his own spirit. The formality of Nevilton House depressed and chilled him, but the formality of age-trimmed trees and hedges liberated his imagination, as some perverse work of a Picasso or a Matisse might have done. He wondered vaguely to himself what was the precise cause of the psychic antipathy which rendered him so cold to the grandeur of Elizabethan architecture, while the other features of his present dwelling remained so attractive, and he came to the temporary solution, as he took his arms from the top of the gate, that it was because that particular kind of magnificence expressed the pride of a class, rather than of an individual, whereas he himself was all for individual self-assertion in everything--in everything! The problem was still teasing him, when, a few minutes later, he passed the graceful tower of St. Catharine’s church. This strangely organic, this curiously anonymous Gothic art--was not this also, the suppression of the individual, in the presence of something larger and deeper, of something that demanded the sacrifice of mere transient personality, as the very condition of its appearance? At all events it was less humiliating, less of an insult, to the claims of the individual will, when the thing was done in the interest of religion, than when it was done in the interests of a class. The impersonality of the former, resembled the impersonality of rocks and flowers; that of the latter, the impersonality of fashions in dress.