His stride lengthened as the road sloped downhill towards the lights of the village. He looked forward to the night’s resting place. He was used to walking long distances and found it no more tiring at sixty than when he had been a younger man, but the journey he was engaged on was a long one, all the way from the Cotswold Hills to the slopes of Hindhead in Surrey. He had walked it the other way the previous week, in order to visit a friend, a former colleague in fact – twenty years ago they had been public-schoolmasters together – who, having seen the light a little later than Cornelius himself, had only just established himself in a Tolstoyan community in the Cotswolds. Cornelius had found the visit stimulating. He very much liked the idea of people banding themselves together in order to work for a better world, indeed, naïve tho’ it now seemed to him, he had in his youth seen the school to which he had dedicated his early manhood rather in that light, but none of the other societies in which he had been involved – the Fellowship of the New Life, the Fabian Society – had seemed to him quite the answer. People tended to go off in such odd directions, towards religion for example, or towards dry statistical analysis of problems he felt should not be approached entirely materialistically (he himself considered that he was a rationalist without being a materalist). It was no doubt far better to form one’s own association, and now that he had found this group of like-minded spirits among whom his friend Rundle had come to settle, there seemed no reason not to do so. He had been thinking of names as he walked through Oxfordshire. The Rationalists’ Guild sounded insufficiently exciting, the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit possibly erred too far in the other direction. Besides, he had a feeling that there had been some such association in Medieval times, and that it had been in some way discreditable. He could not be sure of it – his subject had been Classics, not History – but he thought it was something to do with witchcraft, or possibly sex orgies.

His mind wandered by an uncontrollable progression towards the sitting room of his cottage on the Surrey hills where the fire would be burning brightly and the lamps would be lit beside the upright Broadwood piano at which his wife, Ada, her statuesque beauty belying her fifty-two years, would be settling herself for an evening’s duet-playing with their neighbour, the philosopher H. W. Brigginshaw. Of course he was very fond of old H. W., but Rational Man was only too often subject to the same unworthy emotions as Irrational Man and he wished H. W. would not roll his eyes in that silly way when he came to the tenderer passages of Schubert. Or at least that Ada would not look as though she liked it when he did.