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Professor Pye’s house was visible from one point on the Dorking-Guildford road as a cube of concrete rising above the dark foliage of a group of old yews. Standing upon the chalk ridge and reached only by a steep and flinty lane whose privacy was emphasized by a notice board, it suggested the isolation of an iceberg. Professor Pye’s message to humanity carried no sense of uplift. His notice board did not challenge the casual crowd to climb the heights and speak of Plotinus and Einstein.

It was a rude and abrupt notice board. It said—or rather, it snarled—

Private.

Keep out!

Yes, you!

A serious hiker in shorts, shirt and spectacles, happening upon that notice board, remarked upon it to his mate.

“That’s the sort of thing that puts my back up. Let’s trespass, Maisie.”

Maisie was less politically minded than her mate. It was a hot day, and the lane was steep and stony.

“I don’t see any sense, Fred, in climbing a hill just to have a row.”

“It’s one’s duty to have a row with a fellow who——”

The lady fanned herself with a piece of bracken.

“Too many flies, and I want my tea.”

They passed on, but happening upon a roadman trimming a hedge the young man in spectacles paused to ask questions.

“Excuse me, who lives up there? The fellow who put up that notice board.”

The roadman ran a thumb along the edge of his swaphook.

“That there white house?”

“I suppose so. Sort of chap who owns the earth.”

The roadman grinned.

“Chap named Pye—Professor Pye. Very particular about his privacy.”

“I should say so.”

“Down there in the village they call him Old Crusty.”

The hiker’s spectacles glimmered approvingly.

“Bit of a misanthrope, what!”

The roadman was not familiar with the word, but he divined its meaning.

“All crust and no apple.”

The hikers applauded this piece of rustic humour and passed on in search of tea.

Now, Professor Pye was a very distinguished physicist, but to the public he was not even a name. As a scientist he had not received from his confrères the recognition that is acceptable to a philosopher, and when the simple things of life go wrong there can be no more unphilosophic person than your philosopher. Things had gone wrong for Professor Pye. Someone had once described him as “A man whom nobody liked, a piece of cold flat-fish,” which was both true and an exaggeration. There had been moments in his life when Alfred Pye had been furiously eager to be liked. As a man he had fallen in love with women and friendship and success and the swagger of it, and all of them had flouted him. He possessed a great brain and an unfortunate exterior, a certain resemblance to an undersized grey he-goat.

Women actually shrank from him as from something that was both cold and unpleasantly libidinous. As a young man he had been shocked and wounded and enraged by this shrinking. He could remember sitting on a seat in a moonlit garden, burning to utter the words that other men could utter, and suddenly the girl had risen to her feet. Actually, she had shuddered.

“I think it’s too cold out here.”

And poor Pye’s passion had flopped like a fallen angel into bitter and icy waters.

He was strangely repellent to anything with warm blood, women, children, dogs, his fellow-men, and at one period of his life he had—with bitter irony—made pets of a snake and a tortoise. These cold-blooded creatures had accepted him, and had fed out of his hands. He might have said that they recognized the brother reptile.