Suddenly Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets.

Through the dusk I could just detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable success.
"Well," he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and slapping them together, "here we are at last." The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey.

There was not a sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an innkeeper standing at an open door.
"How jolly it is," he cried, "to get back to civilization.

That notion that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion.

Wait till you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers.