I suppose the good Radet had his axe to grind--just as I had had to grind the State Founder's, but Radet's axe didn't show.
I was reading about an inland valley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing; immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense, half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country.

A little band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in those mists, crept slowly up it.

A man among them was speaking; I seemed to hear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and the silence and the vastness.
And how well it was done--how the man could write; how skilfully he made his points.

There was no slosh about it, no sentiment.

The touch was light, in places even gay.