Among the guests no one especially claimed his interest.  The men were nice but undistinguished—­athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various—­the clever, the would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women “who understood,” and the usual pack of jolly dancing girls and “flappers.”  And Hibbert, with his forty odd years of thick experience behind him, got on well with the lot; he understood them all; they belonged to definite, predigested types that are the same the world over, and that he had met the world over long ago.

But to none of them did he belong.  His nature was too “multiple” to subscribe to the set of shibboleths of any one class.  And, since all liked him, and felt that somehow he seemed outside of them—­spectator, looker-on—­all sought to claim him.

In a sense, therefore, the three worlds fought for him:  natives, tourists, Nature....

It was thus began the singular conflict for the soul of Hibbert. In his own soul, however, it took place.  Neither the peasants nor the tourists were conscious that they fought for anything.  And Nature, they say, is merely blind and automatic.

The assault upon him of the peasants may be left out of account, for it is obvious that they stood no chance of success.  The tourist world, however, made a gallant effort to subdue him to themselves.  But the evenings in the hotel, when dancing was not in order, were—­English.  The provincial imagination was set upon a throne and worshipped heavily through incense of the stupidest conventions possible.  Hibbert used to go back early to his room in the post office to work.

“It is a mistake on my part to have realised that there is any conflict at all,” he thought, as he crunched home over the snow at midnight after one of the dances.  “It would have been better to have kept outside it all and done my work.  Better,” he added, looking back down the silent village street to the church tower, “and—­safer.”

The adjective slipped from his mind before he was aware of it.  He turned with an involuntary start and looked about him.  He knew perfectly well what it meant—­this thought that had thrust its head up from the instinctive region.  He understood, without being able to express it fully, the meaning that betrayed itself in the choice of the adjective.  For if he had ignored the existence of this conflict he would at the same time, have remained outside the arena.  Whereas now he had entered the lists.  Now this battle for his soul must have issue.  And he knew that the spell of Nature was greater for him than all other spells in the world combined—­greater than love, revelry, pleasure, greater even than study.  He had always been afraid to let himself go.  His pagan soul dreaded her terrific powers of witchery even while he worshipped.