"The English people, you mean, father?"
"You find them dull, don't you? And the island a bit cramped—eh?"
Edward waited without replying. He did not quite understand what his indulgent father intended, or was leading up to.
"You'd like to travel and see things and people for yourself, I mean?"
He watched the boy without, as he thought, the latter noticing. The answer pleased but puzzled him.
"We're all much the same, aren't we?" said Edward.
"Well—with differences—yes, we are. But still——"
"It's only the same over and over again, isn't it?" Then, while his father was thinking of this reply, and of what he should say to it, the boy asked suddenly with arresting intensity:
"Are we the only people—the only sort of beings, I mean? Just men and women like us all over the world? No others of any sort—bigger, for instance, or—more wild and wonderful?" Then he added, a thrust of strange yearning in his face and eyes: "More beautiful?" He almost whispered the last words.
His father winced. He divined the origin of that strange inquiry. Upon those immense and lonely mountains, distant in space and time for him, imagination, rich and pagan, ran, he well knew, to vast and mighty beings, superior to human, benignant and maleficent, akin to the stimulating and exhilarating conception of the gods, and certainly non-human.