A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different. - John Buchan

Someone put a tea-tray on the table beside us, and I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I had ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a VAD, and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.

I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious.

Buchan was brought up in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and enjoyed many summer holidays with his grandparents in Broughton, in the Scottish Borders, where he developed a fascination of Scottish history and tales of old heroes, much like how his great idol Sir Walter Scott had done a century before. The young Buchan also developed a love of the local scenery and wildlife, which often feature in detail throughout his novels.