“I sat on the stump of a tree at his feet, and below us stretched the land, the great expanse of the forests, sombre under the sunshine, rolling like a sea, with glints of winding rivers, the grey spots of villages, and here and there a clearing, like an islet of light amongst the dark waves of continuous tree-tops. A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape; the light fell on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint bays, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall of steel.
“And there I was with him, high on the sunshine on the top of that historic hill....”
The striking of the clock brought him away from the book with a jerk, so deep had he been sunk in it that he looked now about the dusky room with a startled uncertain gaze. The familiar place settled once more about him and, with a little sigh, he sank back into the chair. His thin bony legs stuck out in front of him; one trouser-leg was hitched up and his sock, falling down over his boot, left bare part of his calf; his boots had not been laced tightly and the tongues had slipped aside, showing his sock. He was a long thin youth, his hair untidy, his black tie up at the back of his collar; one white and rather ragged cuff had slipped down over his wrist, the other was invisible. His eyes were grey and weak, he had a long pointed nose with two freckles on the very end of it, but his mouth was kindly although too large and indeterminate. His cheeks were thin and showed high cheek-bones; his chin was pronounced enough to be strong but nevertheless helped him very little.
He was untidy and ungainly but not entirely unattractive; his growth was at the stage when nature has not made up its mind as to the next, the final move. That may, after all, be something very pleasant....
His eyes now were dreamy and soft because he was thinking of the book. No book, perhaps, in all his life before had moved him so deeply and he was very often moved—but, as a rule, by cheap and sentimental emotions.
He knew that he was cheap; he knew that he was sentimental; he, very often, hated and despised himself.
He could see the Forests “rolling like a sea”. It was as though he, himself, had been perched upon that high, bright hill, and he was exalted, he felt, with that same exultation; the space, the freedom, the liberty, the picture of a world wherein anything might happen, where heroes, fugitives, scoundrels, cowards, conquerors all alike might win their salvation. “Room for everyone ... no one to pull one up—No one to make one ashamed of what one says and does. No crowd watching one’s every movement. Adventures for the wishing and courage to meet them.”
He looked about the room and hated it,—the old, shabby, hemmed-in thing! He hated this life to which he was condemned; he hated himself, his world, his uninspiring future.
“My God, I must do something!... I will do something!... But suppose I can’t!” His head fell again—suppose he were out in that other world, there in the heart of those dark forests, suppose that he found that he did no better there than here!... That would be, indeed, the most terrible thing of all!
He gazed up into the Mirror, saw in it the reflection of the room, the green walls, the green carpet, the old faded green place like moss covering dead ground. Soft, damp, dark,—and beyond outside the Mirror, the world of the Forests—“the great expanse of Forests” and “beyond, the Ocean—smooth and polished ... rising up to the sky in a wall of steel.”