“Do you think so?” he asked, deferentially. “Well, perhaps it is. In England you keep your ideals hidden until some great catastrophe happens, then you bring them out to help you along. Otherwise it is immodest to expose them. In Russia, ideals are exposed all the time, so that when the time for their application comes, they’re worn so thin they’re useless. Poor Russia,” he sighed. “It has idealized itself to extinction. All my boyhood’s companions—the students, the _intelligentsia_, as they called themselves, who used to sit and talk and talk for hours of their wonderful theories—you in England have no idea how Russian visionary can talk—and I learned to talk with them—where are they now? The fortunate were killed in action. The others, either massacred or rotting in prisons, or leading the filthy hunted lives of pariah dogs. The Beast arose like a foul shape from the Witch’s cauldron of their talk . . . and devoured them. Yes, perhaps the stolid English way is the better.” “What about your Will-o’-the-Wisp theory?” asked Olivia. He threw out his hands. “Ah! That is the secret. Keep it to yourself. Don’t point it out to a thousand people, and say: ‘Join me in the chase of the Will-o’-the-Wisp.’ For the thousand other people will each see an _ignis fatuus_ of their own and point it out, so that there are myriads of them, and your brain reels, and you’re swallowed up in the bog to a dead certainty. In plain words, every human being must have his own individual and particular guiding star which he must follow steadfastly. My guiding star is not yours, Miss Gale, nor Olifant’s. We each have our own.” Olifant smiled indulgently. “_Moscovus loquitur_,” he murmured. “What’s that?” asked Olivia. “He says, my dear Miss Gale, that the Russian will ever be talking.” “I’m not so sure that I don’t approve,” said she. Triona laid his hand on his heart and made a little bow. She went on, casting a rebuking glance at Olifant, who had begun to laugh: “After all, it’s more entertaining and stimulating to talk about ideas than about stupid facts. Most people seem to regard an idea as a disease. They shy at it as if it were smallpox.” Olifant protested. He was capable of playing football with ideas as any man. Self-satirical, he asked was he not of Balliol? Olivia, remembering opportunely a recent Cambridge dinner neighbour’s criticism of the famous Oxford College—at the time it had bored her indifferent mind—and an anecdote with which he drove home his remarks, that of a sixth-form contemporary who had written to him in the prime flush of his freshman’s term: “Balliol is not a college; it is a School of Thought,” cried out: “Isn’t that rather a crude metaphor for Balliol?”