The altar fire by A.C. Benson

One sees a house, like the house we now live in, from a road as one passes, from the windows of a train. It seems to be set at the end of the world, with the earth's sunset distance behind it -- it seems a fortress of quiet, a place of infinite peace; and then one lives in it, and behold, it is a centre of a little active life, with all sorts of cross-currents darting to and fro, over it, past it.

Or again one thinks, as one sees such a house in passing, that there at least one could live in meditation and cloistered calm; that there would be neither cares nor anxieties; that one would be content to sit, just looking out at the quiet fields, pacing to and fro, receiving impressions, musing, selecting, apprehending -- and then one lives there, and the stream of life is as turbid, as fretful as ever. The strange thing is that such delusions survive any amount of experience; that one cannot read into other lives the things that trouble one's own.