At the Sign of the Fox

This book starts its story with the lead characters, Robert Stead and Dr. Russell, clad for hunting, tramped down a pent road through the woodland and halted at the bars that separated it from the highway. Between these two men, neither young, as often happens between close friends of either sex, silence did not come from a lack of mutual understanding. It is only the machine-made or undeveloped brain that mistakes garrulity for companionship and casts the blight of motiveless chatter upon the precious gift of silent hours, wherein the soul may learn to know itself. More than fifteen years divided their ages, and their temperaments were wider still apart; you could judge this even from trifles, as the shape of their pipes and the way in which they held and smoked them.