It was a fine and beautiful country--to look at--but the farms, and with them the chances of dinner, and a friendly place to sleep, grew momentarily scarcer.

Upon the hills here and there, indeed, were to be seen the pretentious summer homes of rich dwellers from the cities, but I looked upon them with no great hopefulness.
"Of all places in the world," I said to myself, "surely none could be more unfriendly to a man like me." But I amused myself with conjectures as to what might happen (until the adventure seemed almost worth trying) if a dusty man with a bag on his back should appear at the door of one of those well-groomed establishments.

It came to me, indeed, with a sudden deep sense of understanding, that I should probably find there, as everywhere else, just men and women.

And with that I fell into a sort of Socratic dialogue with myself: ME: Having decided that the people in these houses are, after all, merely men and women, what is the best way of reaching them?
MYSELF: Undoubtedly by giving them something they want and have not.
ME: But these are rich people from the city; what can they want that they have not?
MYSELF: Believe me, of all people in the world those who want the most are those who have the most.

These people are also consumed with desires.
ME: And what, pray, do you suppose they desire?
MYSELF: They want what they have not got; they want the unattainable: they want chiefly the rarest and most precious of all things--a little mystery in their lives.
"That's it!" I said aloud; "that's it! Mystery--the things of the spirit, the things above ordinary living--is not that the essential thing for which the world is sighing, and groaning, and longing--consciously, or unconsciously ?" I have always believed that men in their innermost souls desire the highest, bravest, finest things they can hear, or see, or feel in all the world.