Chap­ter XXVIII opens in the fad­ing light of day, where the vil­lage fair begins its spir­it­ed descent into evening’s fes­tiv­i­ties. Bright acety­lene lamps flick­er to life, throw­ing sharp, shift­ing shad­ows across the open space where dancers gath­er in joy­ful chaos. Bod­ies move in rhythm, feet echo­ing on the hard ground, laugh­ter ris­ing above the crack­ling music. Denis watch­es from the edge, present yet apart, caught between the pull of the scene and the weight of his thoughts. Around him swirl the familiar—Priscilla’s grace, Mary’s ener­gy, Mr. Scogan’s awk­ward move­ments, and Jenny’s con­fi­dent com­mand of the drums. It should be enough to lift any onlook­er into the moment, but Denis feels the gap between obser­va­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion widen­ing. He sees the beau­ty of it all yet feels no part of it. In that dis­tance, his iso­la­tion takes on a sharp­er edge, made more poignant by the live­li­ness he can­not ful­ly enter.

From this qui­et detach­ment, Denis is drawn away by the sud­den appear­ance of Hen­ry Wim­bush. With char­ac­ter­is­tic eccen­tric­i­ty, Hen­ry invites him to look at ancient drainpipes—relics of the estate’s past glo­ry that seem more thrilling to him than the dancers’ vital­i­ty. Their con­ver­sa­tion shifts quick­ly from objects to ideas, and Henry’s true pas­sion reveals itself not in the arti­facts, but in the com­fort of his­to­ry. He admits a pref­er­ence for books over peo­ple, for the dead over the liv­ing. There is no mess in lit­er­a­ture, he explains, only insight. Mod­ern com­pa­ny, with its unpre­dictabil­i­ty and noise, exhausts him. In his mind, human con­nec­tion has lost its charm, replaced by the calm log­ic of the past. Denis lis­tens, intrigued, though unsure whether this is wis­dom or with­draw­al dressed in poet­ic detach­ment. Henry’s view, at once melan­cholic and log­i­cal, casts a cold shad­ow on the warm cel­e­bra­tion still under­way.

Wim­bush con­tin­ues, imag­in­ing a future shaped by effi­cien­cy, where machines relieve men of inter­ac­tion, and soli­tude becomes not pun­ish­ment, but reward. He dreams aloud of a world where qui­et replaces chat­ter and move­ment becomes option­al. In this imag­ined soci­ety, every­one lives alone but with per­fect convenience—no need to dance, to talk, or to engage unless by choice. The vision feels simul­ta­ne­ous­ly peace­ful and ster­ile. Wim­bush does­n’t seem sad about it. Instead, he’s com­fort­ed by the idea of free­dom from the chaos of com­pa­ny. Denis con­sid­ers it all, weigh­ing his own long­ing for con­nec­tion against the appeal of such neat­ly con­tained iso­la­tion. It’s not rejec­tion of joy, Hen­ry insists, but an embrace of depth over noise, pat­tern over spon­tane­ity. His nos­tal­gia for past eras is root­ed less in romance and more in con­trol. The past, once record­ed, nev­er sur­pris­es you.

As they wan­der back toward the dance, the music grows loud­er, more hur­ried, the crowd sway­ing as if caught in a dream. Wimbush’s voice soft­ens. He acknowl­edges, with a kind of wist­ful amuse­ment, that what’s hap­pen­ing now—the noise, the col­or, the spin­ning joy—will some­day exist only as mem­o­ry. And when it does, it will feel beau­ti­ful, pos­si­bly more beau­ti­ful than it does in this moment. Lit­er­a­ture, he sug­gests, has always improved the past, giv­ing shape to its plea­sures in ways that real­i­ty can­not sus­tain. The dance before them, so full of life, already starts to seem unre­al, as if fad­ing into sto­ry. Denis, drawn back into the scene but still weighed down by thought, feels that con­tra­dic­tion deeply. He can­not lose him­self in the dance because he is too aware of its mean­ing, too alert to its imper­ma­nence.

What unfolds in this chap­ter is a con­trast between cel­e­bra­tion and con­tem­pla­tion, a ten­sion between par­tic­i­pa­tion and detach­ment. Denis stands at the cross­roads, unsure which path to take. He sees in Wim­bush a kind of safety—intellectual, con­trolled, and neat—but he also sens­es a cost. Joy, messy as it is, lives in risk. To engage with peo­ple, to dance, to speak, is to open one­self to fail­ure, awk­ward­ness, even rejec­tion. Yet to avoid it entire­ly is to miss the very thing one yearns for: con­nec­tion. The fair’s noise con­tin­ues, but for Denis, it has tak­en on a ghost­like qual­i­ty. What was vibrant now seems del­i­cate, tem­po­rary. This moment, once missed, can­not be remade. And so, the dance con­tin­ues, not just in the square, but in Denis’s thoughts, spin­ning between desire and hes­i­ta­tion, between watch­ing and liv­ing.