You don't know how to get on with women, which is a great defect, considering that half the world consists of women." Hirst groaned that he was quite aware of that.
But Hewet's complacency was a little chilled as he walked with Hirst to the place where a general meeting had been appointed.

He wondered why on earth he had asked these people, and what one really expected to get from bunching human beings up together.
"Cows," he reflected, "draw together in a field; ships in a calm; and we're just the same when we've nothing else to do.

But why do we do it ?--is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of things" (he stopped by a stream and began stirring it with his walking-stick and clouding the water with mud), "making cities and mountains and whole universes out of nothing, or do we really love each other, or do we, on the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, knowing nothing, leaping from moment to moment as from world to world ?--which is, on the whole, the view _I_ incline to." He jumped over the stream; Hirst went round and joined him, remarking that he had long ceased to look for the reason of any human action.
Half a mile further, they came to a group of plane trees and the salmon-pink farmhouse standing by the stream which had been chosen as meeting-place.

It was a shady spot, lying conveniently just where the hill sprung out from the flat.

Between the thin stems of the plane trees the young men could see little knots of donkeys pasturing, and a tall woman rubbing the nose of one of them, while another woman was kneeling by the stream lapping water out of her palms.
As they entered the shady place, Helen looked up and then held out her hand.
"I must introduce myself," she said.