After four longyears in Brooklyn, George Webber came out of the wilderness, looked round him, and concluded he had had enough of it. During this period he had learned much, both about himself and about America, but now he was seized again with wanderlust. His life had always seemed to shift between the poles of anchored loneliness and foot-loose voyagings — between wandering for ever, and then the earth again — and now the old and restless urgings of “Where shall we go? And what shall we do?” again became insistent, would not down, and demanded of him a new answer.

Ever since his first book bad been published be had been looking for a way to form and shape his next. Now he thought that he had found it. It was not the way, perhaps, but it was a way. The hundreds and thousands of separate and disjointed notes that he had written down had fallen at last into a pattern in his mind. He needed only to weave them all together, and fill in the blanks, and he would have a book. He felt that be could do this final job of organisation and revision better if he made a clean break in the monotony ‘of his life. New scenes, new faces, and new atmospheres might clear his head and sharpen his perspective.

It would be a good thing, too, to get away from America for a while. Too much was happening here — it was too exciting and disturbing. The whole thing was in such a state of flux, in such a prophetic condition of becoming, that the sheer exhilaration of watc............