"Yes, I am. I consider the country is only suited to people who are young enough to go in for picnics and ideals and things of that kind. Up to five-and-twenty, sunsets excite your highest emotions, and make you yearn after the impossible; after five-and-twenty, they give you rheumatism and show up your wrinkles."
"I like the country," remarked Lord Robert Thistletown, "though I am at last in the proud position of being able to deny the soft impeachment of being under five-and-twenty; it always makes me feel good, and fills me with the desire to sing hymns and to write to my mother."
"I also like the country," murmured Mr. Madderley; "it gives me a peaceful, lotus-eating kind of feeling, which is most soothing."
Isabel shook her head. "I could stand a land where it was always afternoon, but what I cannot endure is a land where it is always Sunday evening."
"I thought you liked Sunday evenings and things of that kind," remarked Lord Robert.
"I used to, but I have outgrown them," replied Isabel.
"Dear lady, I understand," sighed Mr. Madderley. "I never cared for Sunday evenings myself, but I used to adore Holman Hunt. It is the same kind of sentiment, and indicates the state of mind which would revel in Wordsworth's 'Ode on the Intimations of Immortality'."
"Have you outgrown it too?"
"I have not outgrown my appreciation of the art and the poetry thus embodied; but I have ceased to have any feeling excited thereby save admiration."
"I suppose the real explanation is that as we grow older we lose in imagination what we gain in experience," said Lord Wrexham.