"You might ask me," he suggested, "instead of experimenting, when I do happen to be at hand. Otherwise a dictionary, or Miss Pinner in the next room...?"

Gerda was happy, now that the shadow was off his face. Raillery and rebuke she did not mind; only the shadow, which fell coldly on her heart too.

He left the office then for the day, as he often did, but it was warm and alive with his presence, and she was doing his work, and she would see him again in the morning.

6

Gerda went home only for week-ends now; it was too slow a journey to make every morning and evening. She stayed during the week at a hotel called the Red House, in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street. It was a hotel kept by revolutionary souls exclusively for revolutionary souls. Gerda, who had every right there, had gained admittance through friends of hers who lodged there. Every evening at six o'clock she went back through the rain, as she did this evening, and changed her wet clothes and sat down to dinner, a meal which all the revolutionary souls ate together so that it was sacramental, a breaking of common bread in token of a common faith.

They were a friendly party. At one end of the table Aunt Phyllis presided. Aunt Phyllis, who was really the aunt of only one young man, kept this Red House. She was a fiery little revolutionary in the late forties, small, and thin and darting, full of faith and fire. She was on the staff of the British Bolshevist, and for the rest, wrote leaflets, which showered from her as from trees in autumn gales. So did the Rev. Anselm Digby. Mr. Digby had also the platform habit, he would go round the country denouncing and inciting to revolution in the name of Christ and of the Third International. Though grizzled, he belonged to the League of Youth, as well as to many other eager fraternities. He was unbeneficed, having no time for parish work. This ardent clergyman sat at the other end of Aunt Phyllis's table, as befitted his years.

The space between the two ends was filled by younger creatures. It was spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony, free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the years of the great war and those persons over military age who had not been called upon to enter them, or about freedom; free love, free thought and a free world. Yes, both these subjects sound a little old-fashioned, but the Red House was concerned with these elemental changeless things. And some of them also wrote fiction, quiet, grey, a little tired, about unhappy persons to whom nothing was very glad or very sad, and certainly neither right nor wrong, but only rough or smooth of surface, bright or dark of hue, sweet or bitter of taste or smell. Most of those in the room belonged to a Freudian circle at their club, and all were anti-Christian, except an Irish Roman Catholic, who had taken an active part in the Easter uprising of 1916, since when he had been living in exile; Aunt Phyllis, who believed in no churches but in the Love of God; and of course, Mr. Digby. All these people, though they did not always get on very well together, were linked by a common aim in life, and by common hatreds.

But, in spite of hate, the Red House lodgers were a happy set of revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries; having their leaflets printed by secret presses; members of societies which exchanged confidential letters with the more eminent Russians, such as Litvinoff and Trotzky, collected for future publication secret circulars, private strike-breaking orders, and other obiter dicta of a rash government, and believed themselves to be working to establish the Soviet government over Europe. They had been angry all this summer because the Glasgow conference of the I.L.P. had broken with the Third International. They spoke with acerbity of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Snowden. But now, in August, they had little acerbity to spare for anything but the government's conduct of Irish affairs.

7

But, though these were Gerda's own people, the circle in which she felt at home, she looked forward every night to the morning, when there would be the office again, and Barry.

Sometimes Barry took her out to dinner and a theatre. They went to the "Beggar's Opera," "The Grain of Mustard Seed," "Mary Rose" (which they found sentimental), and to the "Beggar's Opera" again Gerda had her own ideas, very definite and critical, about dramatic merit. Barry enjoyed discussing the plays with her, listening to her clear little silver voice pronouncing judgment. Gerda might be forever mediocre in any form of artistic expression, but she was an artist, with the artist's love of merit and scorn of the second-rate.

They went to "Mary Rose" with some girl cousins of Barry's, two jolly girls from Girton. Against their undiscriminating enthusiasm, Gerda and her fastidious distaste stood out sharp and clear, like some delicate etching among flamboyant pictures. That fastidiousness she had from both her parents, with something of her own added.

Barry went home with her. He wondered how her fastidiousness stood the grimy house in Magpie Alley and its ramshackle habit of life, after the distinctions and beauty of Windover, but he thought it was probably very good for her, part of the experience which should mould the citizen. Gerda shrank from no experience. At the corner of Bouverie Street they met a painted girl out for hire, strayed for some reason into this unpropitious locality. For the moment Gerda had fallen behind and Barry seemed alone. The girl stopped in his path, looked up in his face enquiringly, and he pushed his way, not urgently, past her. The next moment Gerda's hand caught his arm.

"Stop, Barry, stop."

"Stop? What for?"

"The woman. Didn't you see?"

"My dear child, I can't do anything for her."

Like the others of her generation, Gerda was interested in persons of that profession; he knew that already; only they saw them through a distorting mist.

"We can find out where she works, what wages she gets, why she's on the streets. She's probably working for sweated wages somewhere. We ought to find out."

"We can't find out about every woman of that kind we meet. The thing is to attack the general principle behind the thing, not each individual case.... Besides, it would be so frightfully impertinent of us. How would you like it if someone stopped you in the street and asked you where you worked and whether you were sweated or not, and why you were out so late?"

"I shouldn't mind, if they wanted to know for a good reason. One ought to find out how things are, what people's conditions are."

It was what Barry too believed and practised, but he could only say "It's the wrong way round. You've got to work from the centre to the circumference.... And don't fall into the sentimental mistake of thinking that all prostitution comes from sweated labour. A great deal does, of course, but a great deal because it seems to some women an easy and attractive way of earning a living.... Oh, hammer away at sweated labour for all you're worth, of course, for that reason and every other; but you won't stop prostitution till you stop the demand for it. That's the poisonous root of the thing. So long as the demand goes on, you'll get the supply, whatever economic conditions may be."

Gerda fell silent, pondering on the strange tastes of those who desired for some reason the temporary company of these unfortunate females, so unpleasing to the eye, to the ear, to the mind, to the smell; desired it so much that they would pay money for it. Why? Against that riddle the non-comprehension of her sex beat itself, baffled. She might put it the other way round, try to imagine herself desiring, paying for, the temporary attentions of some dirty, common, vapid, and patchouli-scented man—and still she got no nearer. For she never could desire it.... Well, anyhow, there the thing was. Stop the demand? Stop that desire of men for women? Stop the ready response of women to it? If that was the only way, then there was indeed nothing for it but education—and was even education any use for that?

"Is it love," she asked of Barry, "that the men feel who want these women?"

Barry laughed shortly. "Love? Good Lord, no."

"What then, Barry?"

"I don't know that it can be explained, exactly.... It's a passing taste, I suppose, a desire for the company of another sex from one's own, just because it is another sex, though it may have no other attractions.... It's no use trying to analyse it, one doesn't get anywhere. But it's not love."

"What's love, then? What's the difference?"

"Have I to define love, walking down Magpie Alley? You could do it as well as I could. Love has the imagination in it, and the mind. I suppose that's the difference. And, too, love wants to give. This is all platitude. No one can ever say anything new about love, it's all been said. Got your latch-key?"

Gerda let herself into the Red House and went up to bed and lay wakeful. Very certainly she loved Barry, with all her imagination and all her mind, and she would have given him more than all that was hers. Very surely and truly she loved him, even if after all he was to be her uncle by marriage, which would make their family life like that in one of Louis Couperus's books. But why unhappy like that? Was love unhappy? If she might see him sometimes, talk to him, if Nan wouldn't want all of him all the time—and it would be unlike Nan to do that—she could be happy. One could share, after all. Women must share, for there were a million more women in England than men.

But probably Nan didn't mean to marry him at all. Nan never married people....

8

Next morning at the office Barry said he had heard from Nan. She had asked him to come too and bicycle in Cornwall, with her and Gerda and Kay.

"You will, won't you," said Gerda.

"Rather, of course."

A vaguely puzzled note sounded in his voice. But he would come.

Cornwall was illuminated to Gerda. The sharing process would begin there. But for a week more she had him to herself, and that was better.



CHAPTER VIII

NAN

1

Nan at Marazion bathed, sailed, climbed, walked and finished her book. She had a room at St. Michael's Cafe, at the edge of the little town, just above the beach. Across a space of sea at high tide, and of wet sand and a paved causeway slimy with seaweed at the ebb, St. Michael's Mount loomed, dark against a sunset sky, pale and unearthly in the dawn, an embattled ship riding anchored on full waters, or stranded on drowned sands.

Nan stayed at the empty little town to be alone. But she was not alone all the time, for at Newlyn, five miles away, there was the artist colony, and some of these artists were her friends. (In point of fact, it is impossible to be alone in Cornwall; the place to go to for that would be Hackney, or some other district of outer London, where inner Londoners do not go for holidays.) Had she liked she could have had friends to play with all day, and talk and laughter and music all night, as in London. She did not like. She went out by herself, worked by herself; and all the time, in company, or alone, talking or working, she knew herself withdrawn really into a secret cove of her own which was warm and golden as no actual coves in this chill summer were warm and golden; a cove on whose good brown sand she lay and made castles and played, while at her feet the great happy sea danced and beat, the great tumbling sea on which she would soon put out her boat.

She would count the days before Barry would be with her.

"Three weeks now. Twenty days; nineteen, eighteen..." desiring neither to hurry nor to retard them, but watching them slip behind her in a deep content. When he came, he and Gerda and Kay, they would spend one night and one day in this fishing-town, lounging about its beach, and in Newlyn, with its steep crooked streets between old grey walls hung with shrubs, and beyond Newlyn, in the tiny fishing hamlets that hung above the little coves from Penzance to Land's End. They were going to bicycle all along the south coast. But before that they would have had it out, she and Barry; probably here, in the little pale climbing fishing-town. No matter where, and no matter how; Nan cared nothing for scenic arrangements. All she had to do was to convey to Barry that she would say yes now to the question she had put off and off, let him ask it, give her answer, and the thing would be done.

2

Meanwhile she wrote the last chapters of her book, sitting on the beach among drying nets and boats, in some fishing cove up the coast. The Newlyn shore she did not like, because the artist-spoilt children crowded round her, interrupting.

"Lady, lady! Will you paint us?"

"No. I don't paint."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Writing. Go away."

"May we come with you to where you're staying?"

"No. Go away."

"Last year a lady took us to her studio and gave us pennies. And when she'd gone back to London she sent us each a doll."

Silence.

"Lady, if we come with you to your studio, will you give us pennies?"

"No. Why should I?"

"You might because you wanted to paint us. You might because you liked us."

"I don't do either. Go away now."

They withdrew a little and turned somersaults, supposing her to be watching. The artistic colony had a lot to answer for, Nan thought; they were making parasites and prostitutes of the infant populace. Children could at their worst be detestable in their vanity, their posing, their affectation, their unashamed greed.

"Barry's and mine," she thought (I suppose we'll have some), "shall at least not pose. They may break all the commandments, but if they turn somersaults to be looked at I shall drop them into a public creche and abandon them."

The prettiest little girl looked sidelong at the unkind lady, and believed her half-smile to denote admiration. Pretty little girls often make this error.

Stephen Lumley came along the beach. It was lunch time, and after lunch they were going out sailing. Stephen Lumley was the most important artist just now in Newlyn. He had been in love with Nan for some months, and did not get on with his wife. Nan liked him; he painted brilliantly, and was an attractive, clever, sardonic person. Sailing with him was fun. They understood each other; they had rather the same cynical twist to them. They understood each other really better than Nan and Barry did. Neither of them needed to make any effort to comprehend each other's point of view. And each left the other where he was. Whereas Barry filled Nan, beneath her cynicism, beneath her levity, with something quite new—a queer desire, to put it simply, for goodness, for straight living and generous thinking, even, within reason, for usefulness. More and more he flooded her inmost being, drowning the old landmarks, like the sea at high tide. Nan was not a Christian, did not believe in God, but she came near at this time to believing in Christianity as possibly a fine and adventurous thing to live.

3

Echoes of the great little world so far off came to the Cornish coasts, through the Western Mercury and the stray, belated London papers. Rumours of a projected coal strike, of fighting in Mesopotamia, of political prisoners on hunger strike, of massacres in Ireland, and typists murdered at watering-places; echoes of Fleet Street quarrels, of Bolshevik gold ("Not a bond! Not a franc! Not a rouble!") and, from the religious world, of fallen man and New Faiths for Old. And on Sundays one bought a paper which had for its special star comic turn the reminiscences of the expansive wife of one of our more patient politicians. The world went on just the same, quarrelling, chattering, lying; sentimental, busy and richly absurd; its denizens tilting against each other's politics, murdering each other, trying and always failing to swim across the channel, and always talking, talking, talking. Marazion and Newlyn, and every other place were the world in little, doing all the same things in their own miniature way. Each human soul was the world in little, with all the same conflicts, hopes, emotions, excitements and intrigues. But Nan, swimming, sailing, eating, writing, walking and lounging, browning in salt winds and waters, was happy and remote, like a savage on an island who meditates exclusively on his own affairs.

4

Nan met them at Penzance station. The happy three; they would be good to make holiday with. Already they had holiday faces, though not yet browned like Nan's.

Barry's hand gripped Nan's. He was here then, and it had come. Her head swam; she felt light, like thistledown on the wind.

They came up from the station into quiet, gay, warm Penzance, and had tea at a shop. They were going to stay at Marazion that night and the next, and spend the day bicycling to Land's End and back. They were all four full of vigour, brimming with life and energy that needed to be spent. But Gerda looked pale.

"She's been overworking in a stuffy office," Barry said. "And not, except when she dined with me, getting proper meals. What do you think she weighs, Nan?"

"About as much as that infant there," Nan said, indicating a stout person of five at the next table.

"Just about, I daresay. She's only six stone. What are we to do about it?"

His eyes caressed Gerda, as they might have caressed a child. He would be a delightful uncle by marriage, Nan thought.

They took the road to Marazion. The tide was going out. In front of them the Mount rose in a shallowing violet sea.

"My word!" said Barry, and Kay, screwing up his eyes, murmured, "Good old Mount." Gerda's lips parted in a deep breath; beauty always struck her dumb.

Into the pale-washed, straggling old village they rode, stabled their bicycles, and went down to the shining evening sands, where now the paved causeway to the Mount was all exposed, running slimy and seaweedy between rippled wet sands and dark, slippery rocks. Bare-footed they trod it, Gerda and Kay in front, Barry and Nan behind, and the gulls talking and wheeling round them.

Nan stopped, the west in her eyes. "Look."

Point beyond point they saw stretching westward to Land's End, dim and dark beyond a rose-flushed sea.

"Isn't it clear," said Nan. "You can see the cliff villages ever so far along ... Newlyn, Mousehole, Clement's Island off it—and the point of Lamorna."

Barry said "We'll go to Land's End by the coast road to-morrow, shan't we, not the high road?"

"Oh, the coast road, yes. It's about twice the distance, with the ups and downs, and you can't ride all the way. But we'll go by it."

For a moment they stood side by side, looking westward over the bay.

Nan said, "Aren't you glad you came?"

"I should say so!"

His answer came, quick and emphatic. There was a pause after it. Nan suddenly turned on him the edge of a smile.

Barry did not see it. He was not looking at her, nor over the bay, but in front of him, to where Gerda, a thin little upright form, moved bare-legged along the shining causeway to the moat.

Nan's smile flickered out. The sunset tides of rose flamed swiftly over her cheeks, her neck, her body, and receded as sharply, as if someone had hit her in the face. Her pause, her smile, had been equivalent, as she saw them, to a permission, even to an invitation. He had turned away unnoticing, a queer, absent tenderness in his eyes, as they followed Gerda ... Gerda ... walking light-footed up the wet causeway.... Well, if he had got out of the habit of wanting to make love to her, she would not offer him chances again. When he got the habit back, he must make his own chances as best he could.

"Come on," said Nan. "We must hurry."

She left no more pauses, but talked all the time, about Newlyn, about the artists, about the horrid children, the fishing, the gulls, the weather.

"And how's the book?" he asked.

"Nearly done. I'm waiting for the end to make itself."

He smiled and looking round at him she saw that he was not smiling at her or her book, but at Gerda, who had stepped off the causeway and was wading in a rock pool.

He must be obsessed with Gerda; he thought of her, apparently, all the time he was talking about other things. It was irritating for an aunt to bear.

They joined Kay and Gerda on the island. Kay was prowling about, looking for a way by which to enter the forbidden castle. Kay always trespassed when he could, and was so courteous and gentle when he was caught at it that he disarmed comment. But this time he could not manage to evade the polite but firm eye of the fisherman on guard. They crossed over to Marazion again all together and went to the cafe for supper.

5

It was a merry, rowdy meal they had; ham and eggs and coffee in an upper room, with the soft sea air blowing in on them through open windows. Nan and Barry chattered, and Kay took his cheerful part; only Gerda sparse of word, was quiet and dreamy, with her blue eyes opened wide against sleep, for she had not slept until late last night.

"High time she had a holiday," Barry said of her. "Four weeks' grind in August—it's beginning to tell now."

Fussy Barry was about the child. As bad as Frances Carr with Pamela. Gerda was as strong as a little pony really, though she looked such a small, white, brittle thing.

They got out maps and schemed out roads and routes over their cigarettes. Then they strolled about the little town, exploring its alleys and narrow byways that gave on the sea. The moon had risen now, and Marazion was cut steeply in shadow and silver light, and all the bay lay in shadow and silver too, to where the lights of Penzance twinkled like a great lit church.

Barry thought once, as he had often thought in the past, "How brilliant Nan is, and how gay. No wonder she never needed me. She needs no one," and this time it did not hurt him to think it. He loved to listen to her, to talk and laugh with her, to look at her, but he was free at last; he demanded nothing of her. Those restless, urging, disappointed hopes and longings lay dead in him, dead and at peace. He could not have put his finger on the moment of their death; there had been no moment; like good soldiers they had never died, but faded away, and till to-night he had not known that they had gone. He would show Nan now that she need fear no more pestering from him; she need not keep on talking without pause whenever they were alone together, which had been her old way of defence, and which she was beginning again now. They could drop now into undisturbed friendship. Nan was the most stimulating of friends. It was refreshing to talk things out with her again, to watch her quick mind flashing and turning and cutting its way, brilliant, clear, sharp, like a diamond.

They went to bed; Barry and Kay to the room they had got above a public house, Nan and Gerda to Nan's room at the cafe, where they squeezed into one bed.

Gerda slept, lying very straight and still, as was her habit in sleep. Nan lay wakeful and restless, watching the moonlight steal across the floor and lie palely on the bed and on Gerda's waxen face and yellow hair. The pretty, pale child, strange in sleep, like a little mermaiden lost on earth. Nan, sitting up in bed, one dark plait hanging over each shoulder, watched her with brooding amber eyes. How young she was, how very, very young. It was touching to be so young. Yet why, when youth was, people said, the best time? It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed. That was touching; Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were touching. Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.

A bore, this sharing one bed. You couldn't sleep, however small and quiet your companion lay. They must get a bed each, when they could, during this tour. One must sleep. If one didn't one began to think. Every time Nan forced herself to the edge of sleep, a picture sprang sharply before her eyes—the flaming sky and sea, herself and Barry standing together on the causeway.

"Aren't you glad you came?" Her own voice, soft, encouraging.

"I should say so!" The quick, matter-of-fact answer.

Then a pause and she turning on him the beginnings of a smile. An allowing, inviting ... seductive ... smile.

And he, smiling too, but not at her, looking away to where Gerda and Kay walked bare-legged to the Mount.

Flame scorched her again. The pause each time she saw it now became longer, more deliberate, more inviting, more emptily unfilled. Her smile became more luring, his more rejecting. As she saw it now, in the cruel, distorting night, he had seen her permission and refused it. By day she had known that simple Barry had seen nothing; by day she would know it again. Between days are set nights of white, searing flame, two in a bed so that one cannot sleep. Damn Gerda, lying there so calm and cool. It had been a mistake to ask Gerda to come; if it hadn't been for Gerda they wouldn't have been two in a bed.

"Barry's a good deal taken up with her just now," said Nan to herself, putting it into plain, deliberate words, as was her habit with life's situations. "He does get taken up with pretty girls, I suppose, when he's thrown with them. All men do, if you come to that. For the moment he's thinking about her, not about me. That's a bore. It will bore me to death if it goes on.... I wonder how long it will go on? I wonder how soon he'll want to make love to me again?"

Having thus expressed the position in clear words, Nan turned her mind elsewhere. What do people think of when they are seeking sleep? It is worse than no use to think of what one is writing; that wakes one up, goads every brain-cell into unwholesome activity. No use thinking of people; they are too interesting. Nor of sheep going through gates; they tumble over one another and make one's head ache. Nor of the coming day; that is too difficult: nor of the day which is past; that is too near. Wood paths, quiet seas, running streams—these are better.

"Any lazy man can swim Down the current of a stream."

Or the wind in trees, or owls crying, or waves beating on warm shores. The waves beat now; ran up whisperingly with the incoming tide, broke, and sidled back, dragging at the wet sand.... Nan, hearing them, drifted at last into sleep.



CHAPTER IX

THE PACE

1

The coast road to Land's End is like a switchback. You climb a mountain and are flung down to sea level like a shooting star, and climb a mountain again. Sometimes the road becomes a sandy cliff path and you have to walk.

But at last, climbing up and being shot down and walking, Nan and Barry and Gerda and Kay reached Land's End. They went down to Sennan Cove to bathe, and the high sea was churning breakers on the beach. Nan dived through them with the arrowy straightness of a fish or a submarine, came up behind them, and struck out to sea. The others behind her, less skilful, floundered and were dashed about by the waves. Barry and Kay struggled through them somehow, bruised and choked; Gerda, giving it up—she was no great swimmer—tranquilly rolled and paddled in the surf by herself.

Kay called to her, mocking.

"Coward. Sensualist. Come over the top like a man."

Nan, turning to look at her from the high crest of a wave, thought "Gerda's afraid in a high sea. She is afraid of things: I remember."

Nan herself was afraid of very little. She had that kind of buoyant physical gallantry which would take her into the jaws of danger with a laugh. When in London during the air raids she had walked about the streets to see what could be seen; in France with the Fannys she had driven cars over shelled roads with a cool composure which distinguished her even among that remarkably cool and composed set of young women; as a child she had ridden unbroken horses and teased and dodged savage bulls for the fun of it; she would go sailing in seas that fishermen refused to go out in; part angry dogs which no other onlooker would touch; sleep out alone in dark and lonely woods, and even on occasion brave pigs. The kind of gay courage she had was a physical heritage which can never be acquired. What can be acquired, with blood and tears, is the courage of the will, stubborn and unyielding, but always nerve-racked, proudly and tensely strung up. Nan's form of fearlessness, combined as it was with the agility of a supple body excellently trained, would carry her lightly through all physical adventures, much as her arrowy strength and skill carried her through the breakers without blundering or mishap and let her now ride buoyantly on each green mountain as it towered.

Barry, emerging spluttering from one of these, said "All very jolly for you, Nan. You're a practised hand. We're being drowned. I'm going out of it," and he dived through another wave for the shore. Kay, a clumsier swimmer, followed him, and Nan rode her tossing horses, laughing at them, till she was shot onto the beach and dug her fingers deep into the sucking sand.

"A very pretty landing," said Barry, generously, rubbing his bruised limbs and coughing up water.

Gerda rose from the foam where she had been playing serenely impervious to the tauntings of Kay.

Barry said "Happy child. She's not filled up with salt water and battered black and blue."

Nan remarked that neither was she, and they went to their rock crannies to dress. They dressed and undressed in a publicity, a mixed shamelessness that was almost appalling.

They rode back to Marazion after tea along the high road, more soberly than they had come.

"Tired, Gerda?" Barry said, at the tenth mile, as they pulled up a hill. "Hold on to me."

Gerda refused to do so mean a thing. She had her own sense of honour, and believed that everyone should carry his or her own burden. But when they had to get off and walk up the hill she let him help to push her bicycle.

"Give us a few days, Nan," said Barry, "and we'll all be as fit as you. At present we're fat and scant of breath from our sedentary and useful life."

"Our life"—as if they had only the one between them.

At Newlyn Nan stopped. She said she was going to supper with someone there and would come on later. She was, in fact, tired of them. She dropped into Stephen Lumley's studio, which was, as usual after painting hours, full of his friends, talking and smoking. That was the only way to spend the evening, thought Nan, talking and smoking and laughing, never pausing. Anyhow that was the way she spent it.

She got back to Marazion at ten o'clock and went to her room at the little cafe. Looking from its window, she saw the three on the shore by the moonlit sea. Kay was standing on the paved causeway, and Barry and Gerda, some way off, were wading among the rocks, bending over the pools, as if they were looking for crabs.

Nan went to bed. When Gerda came in presently, she lay very still and pretended to be asleep.

It was dreadful, another night of sharing a bed. Dreadful to lie so close one to the other; dreadful to touch accidentally; touching people reminded you how alive they are, with their separate, conscious throbbing life so close against yours.

2

Next morning they took the road eastward. They were going to ride along the coast to Talland Bay, where they were going to spend a week. They were giving themselves a week to get there, which would allow plenty of time for bathing by the way. It is no use hurrying in Cornwall, the hills are too steep and the sea too attractive, and lunch and tea, when ordered in shops, so long in coming. The first day they only got round the Lizard to Cadgwith, where they dived from steep rocks into deep blue water. Nan dived from a high rock with a swoop like a sea bird's, a pretty thing to watch. Barry was nearly as good; he too was physically proficient. The Bendishes were less competent; they were so much younger, as Barry said. But they too reached the water head first, which is, after all, the main thing in diving. And as often as Nan dived, with her arrowy swoop, Gerda tumbled in too, from the same rock, and when Nan climbed a yet higher rock and dived again, Gerda climbed too, and fell in sprawling after her. Gerda to-day was not to be outdone, anyhow in will to attempt, whatever her achievement might lack. Nan looked up from the sea with a kind of mocking admiration at the little figure poised on the high shelf of rock, slightly unsteady about the knees, slightly blue about the lips, thin white arms pointing forward for the plunge.

The child had pluck.... It must have hurt, too, that slap on the nearly flat body as she struck the sea. She hadn't done it well. She came up with a dazed look, shaking the water out of her eyes, coughing.

"You're too ambitious," Barry told her. "That was much too high for you. You're also blue with cold. Come out."

Gerda looked up at Nan, who was scrambling nimbly onto the highest ledge of all, crying "I must have one more."

Barry said to Gerda "No, you're not going after her. You're coming out. It's no use thinking you can do all Nan does. None of us can."

Gerda gave up. The pace was too hard for her. She couldn't face that highest rock; the one below had made her feel cold and queer and shaky as she stood on it. Besides, why was she trying, for the first time in her life, to go Nan's pace, which had always been, and was now more than ever before, too hot and mettlesome for her? She didn't know why; only that Nan had been, somehow, all day setting the pace, daring her, as it were, to make it. It was becoming, oddly, a point of honour between them, and neither knew how or why.

3

On the road it was the same. Nan, with only the faintest, if any application of brakes, would commit herself to lanes which leaped precipitously downwards like mountain streams, zig-zagging like a dog's-tooth pattern, shingled with loose stones, whose unseen end might be a village round some sharp turn, or a cove by the sea, or a field path running to a farm, or merely the foot of one hill and the beginning of the steep pull up the next. Coast roads in Cornwall are like that—often uncertain in their ultimate goal (for map-makers, like bicyclists, are apt to get tired of them, and, tiring, break them off, so to speak, in mid-air, leaving them suspended, like snapped ends of string). But however uncertain their goal may be, their form is not uncertain at all; it can be relied on to be that of a snake in agony leaping down a hill or up; or, if one prefers it, that of a corkscrew plunging downwards into a cork.

Nan leaped and plunged with them. She was at the bottom while the others were still jolting, painfully brake-held, albeit rapidly, half-way down. And sometimes, when the slope was more than usually like the steep roof of a house, the zig-zags more than usually acute, the end even less than usually known, the whole situation, in short, more dreadful and perilous, if possible, than usual, the others surrendered, got off and walked. They couldn't really rely on their brakes to hold them, supposing something should swing round on them from behind one of the corners; they couldn't be sure of turning with the road when it turned at its acutest, and such failure of harmony with one's road is apt to meet with a dreadful retribution. Barry was adventurous, and Kay and Gerda were calm, but to all of them life was sweet and limbs and bicycles precious; none of them desired an untimely end.

But Nan laughed at their prognostications of such an end. "It will be found impossible to ride down these hills," said their road book, and Nan laughed at that too. You can, as she observed, ride down anything; it is riding up that is the difficulty. Anyhow, she, who had ridden bucking horses and mountainous seas, could ride down anything that wore the semblance of a road. Only fools, Nan believed, met with disasters while bicycling. And jamming on the brakes was bad for the wheels and tiring to the hands. So brakeless, she zig-zagged like greased lightning to the bottom.

It was on the second day, on the long hill that runs from Manaccan down to Helford Ferry, that Gerda suddenly took her brakes off and shot after her. That hill is not a badly spiralling one, but it is long and steep and usually ridden with brakes. And just above Helford village it has one very sharp turn to the left.

Nan, standing waiting for the others on the bridge, looked round and saw Gerda shooting with unrestrained wheels and composed face round the last bend. She had nearly swerved over at the turn, but not quite. She got off at the bridge.

"Hullo," said Nan. "Quicker than usual, weren't you?" She had a half-grudging, half-ironic grin of appreciation for a fellow sportsman, the same grin with which she had looked up at her from the sea at Cadgwith. Nan liked daring. Though it was in her, and she knew that it was in her, to hate Gerda with a cold and deadly anger, the sportsman in her gave its tribute. For what was nothing and a matter of ordinary routine to her, might be, she suspected, rather alarming to the quiet, white-faced child.

Then the demon of mischief leapt in her. If Gerda meant to keep the pace, she should have a pace worth keeping. They would prove to one another which was the better woman, as knights in single combat of old proved it, or fighters in the ring to-day. As to Barry, he should look on at it, whether he liked it or not.

Barry and Kay rushed up to them, and they went through the little thatched rose-sweet hamlet to the edge of the broad blue estuary and shouted for the ferry.

4

After that the game began in earnest. Nan, from being casually and unconsciously reckless, became deliberately dare-devil and always with a backward, ironic look for Gerda, as if she said "How about it? Will this beat you?"

"A bicycling tour with Nan isn't nearly so safe as the front trenches of my youth used to be," Barry commented. "Those quiet, comfortable old days!"

There, indeed, one was likely to be shot, or blown to pieces, or buried, or gassed, and that was about all. But life now was like the Apostle Paul's; they were in journeyings often, in weariness often, in perils of waters, in perils by their own countrymen, in perils on the road, in the wilderness, in the sea, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. In perils too, so Gerda believed, of cattle; for these would stray in bellowing herds about narrow lanes, and they would all charge straight through them, missing the lowered horns by some incredible fluke of fortune. If this seems to make Gerda a coward, it should be remembered that she showed none of these inward blenchings, but went on her way with the rest, composed as a little wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. She was, in fact, of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and would probably have gone to the stake for a conviction. But stampeding cattle, and high seas, and brakeless lightning descents, she did not like, however brave a face she was sustained by grace to meet them with. After all she was only twenty, an age when some people still look beneath their beds before retiring.

Bulls, even, Gerda was called upon to face, in the wake of two unafraid males and a reckless aunt. What young female of twenty, always excepting those who have worked on the land, and whose chief reward is familiarity with its beasts, can with complete equanimity face bulls? One day a path they were taking down to the sea ran for a while along the top of a stone hedge, about five feet high and three feet wide. Most people would have walked along this, leading their bicycles. Nan, naturally, bicycled, and Barry and Kay, finding it an amusing experiment, bicycled after her. Gerda, in honour bound, bicycled too. She accepted stoically the probability that she would very soon bicycle off the hedge into the field and be hurt. In the fields on either side of them, cows stared at them in mild surprise and some disdain, coming up close to look. So, if one bicycled off, it would be into the very jaws, onto the very horns, of cattle. Female cattle, indeed, but cattle none the less.

Then Kay chanted "Fat bulls of Basan came round about me on either side," and it was just like that. One fat bull at least trotted up to the hedge, waving his tail and snorting, pawing and glaring, evincing, in short, all the symptoms common to his kind.

So now if one bicycled off it would be into the very maw of an angry bull.

"You look out you don't fall, Gerda," Kay flung back at her over his shoulder. "It will be to a dreadful death, as you see. Nobody'll save you; nobody'll dare."

"Feeling unsteady?" Barry's gentler voice asked her from behind. "Get off and walk it. I will too."

But Gerda rode on, her eyes on Nan's swift, sure progress ahead. Barry should not see her mettle fail; Barry, who had been through the war and would despise cowards.

They reached the end of the hedge, and the path ran off it into a field. And between this field and the last one there was an open gap, through which the bull of Basan lumbered with fierce eyes and stood waiting for them to descend.

"I don't like that creature," Kay said. "I'm afraid of him. Aren't you, Barry?"

"Desperately," Barry admitted. "Anyone would be, except Nan, of course."

Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to charge. But he did not charge Nan. Bulls and other ferocious beasts think it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an unfrightened victim. He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would do.

Kay followed Nan, still chanting his psalm. Gerda followed Kay. As she dropped from the hedge onto the path she turned round once and met Barry's eyes, her own wide and grave, and she was thinking "I can bear anything if he is behind me and sees it happen. I couldn't bear it if I were the last and no one saw." To be gored all alone, none to care ... who could bear that?

The next moment Barry was no longer behind her, but close at her side, bicycling on the grass by the path, between her and the bull. Did he know she was frightened? She hadn't shown it, surely.

"The wind," said Gerda, in her clear, small crystalline voice, "has gone round more to the south. Don't you think so?" And reminded Barry of a French aristocrat demoiselle going with calm and polite conversation to the scaffold.

"I believe it has," he said, and smiled.

And after all the bull, perhaps not liking the look of the bicycles, didn't charge at all, but only ran by their sides with snorting noises until they left him behind at the next gate.

"Did you," enquired Gerda, casually, "notice that bull? He was an awfully fine one, wasn't he?"

"A remarkably noble face, I thought," Kay returned.

They scrambled down cliffs to the cove and bathed.

5

Nan, experienced in such things, as one is at the age of thirty-three if one has led a well-spent life, knew now beyond peradventure what had happened to Barry and what would never happen again between him and her. So that was that, as she put it, definite and matter-of-fact to herself about it. He had stopped wanting her. Well then, she must stop wanting him, as speedily as might be. It took a little time. You could not shoot down the hills of the emotions with the lightning rapidity with which you shot down the roads. Also, the process was excruciatingly painful. You had to unmake so many plans, unthink so many thoughts.... Oh, but that was nothing. You had to hear his voice softened to someone else, see the smile in his eyes caressing someone else, feel his whole mind, his whole soul, reaching out in protecting, adoring care to someone else's charm and loveliness ... as once, as so lately, they had reached out to yours.... That was torture for the bravest, far worse than any bulls or seas or precipices could be to Gerda. Yet it had to be gone through, as Gerda had to leap from towering cliffs into wild seas and ride calmly among fierce cattle.... When Nan woke in the night it was like toothache, a sharp, gnawing, searing hell of pain. Memory choked her, bitter self-anger for joy once rejected and then forever lost took her by the throat, present desolation drowned her soul in hard, slow tears, jealousy scorched and seared.

But, now every morning, pride rose, mettlesome and gallant, making her laugh and talk, so that no one guessed. And with pride, a more reckless physical daring than usual; a kind of scornful adventurousness, that courted danger for its own sake, and wordlessly taunted the weaker spirit with "Follow if you like and can. If you don't like, if you can't, I am the better woman in that way, though you may be the beloved." And the more the mettle of the little beloved rose to meet the challenge, the hotter the pace grew. Perhaps they both felt, without knowing they felt it, that there was something in Barry which leaped instinctively out to applaud reckless courage, some element in himself which responded to it even while he called it foolhardy. You could tell that Barry was of that type, by the quick glow of his eyes and smile. But the rivalry in daring was not really for Barry; Barry's choice was made. It was at bottom the last test of mettle, the ultimate challenge from the loser to the winner, in the lists chosen by the loser as her own. It was also—for Nan was something of a bully—the heckling of Gerda. She might have won one game, and that the most important, but she should be forced to own herself beaten in another, after being dragged painfully along rough and dangerous ways. And over and above and beyond all this, beyond rivalry and beyond Gerda, was the eternal impatience for adventure as such, for quick, vehement living, which was the essence of Nan. She found things more fun that way: that summed it.

6

The long strange days slid by like many-coloured dreams. The steep tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate hamlets huddled between fields above a rock-bound sea. Sometimes they would stop early in the day at some fishing village, find rooms there for the night, and bathe and sail till evening. When they bathed, Nan would swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters, slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action, drowning emotion in the sea.

Once they were all caught in a current and a high sea and swept out, and had to battle for the shore. Even Nan, even Barry, could not get to the cove from which they had bathed; all they could try for was the jut of rocks to westward toward which the seas were sweeping, and to reach this meant a tough fight.

"Barry!"

Nan, looking over her shoulder, saw Gerda's bluing face and wide staring eyes and quickening, flurried strokes. Saw, too, Barry at once at her side, heard his "All right, I'm here. Catch hold of my shoulder."

In a dozen strokes Nan reached them, and was at Gerda's other side.

"Put one hand on each of us and strike for all you're worth with your legs. That's the way...."

Numbly Gerda's two hands gripped Barry's right shoulder and Nan's left. Between them they pulled her, her slight weight dragging at them heavily, helping the running sea against them. They were being swept westward towards the rocks, but swept also outwards, beyond them; they struck northward and northward and were carried always south. It was a close thing between their swimming and the current, and it looked as though the current was winning.

"It'll have to be all we know now," said Nan, as they struggled ten yards from the point.

She and Barry both rather thought that probably it would be all they knew and just the little more they didn't know—they would be swept round the point well to the south of the outermost rock—and then, hey for open sea!

But their swimming proved, in this last fierce minute of the struggle, stronger than the sea. They were swept towards the jutting point, almost round it, when Nan, flinging forward to the right, caught a slippery ledge of rock with her two hands and held on. Barry didn't think she could hold on for more than a second against the swinging seas, or, if she did, could consolidate her position. But he did not know the full power of Nan's trained, acrobatic body. Slipping her shoulder from Gerda's clutch, she grasped instead Gerda's right hand in her left, and with her other arm and with all her sinuous, wiry strength, heaved herself onto the rock and there flung her body flat, reaching out her free hand to Barry. Barry caught it just in time, as he was being swung on a wave outwards, and pulled himself within grip of the rock, and in another moment he lay beside her, and between them they hauled up Gerda.

Gerda gasped "Kay," and they saw him struggling twenty yards behind.

"Can you do it?" Barry shouted to him, and Kay grinned back.

"Let you know presently.... Oh yes, I'm all right. Getting on fine."

Nan stood up on the rock, watching him, measuring with expert eye the ratio between distance and pace, the race between Kay's swimming and the sea. It seemed to her to be anyone's race.

Barry didn't stand up. The strain of the swim had been rather too much for him, and in his violent lurch onto the rock he had strained his side. He lay flat, feeling battered and sick.

The sea, Nan judged after another minute of watching, was going to beat Kay in this race. For Kay's face had turned a curious colour, and he was blue round the lips. Kay's heart was not strong.

Nan's dive into the tossing waves was as pretty a thing as one would wish to see. The swoop of it carried her nearly to Kay's side. Coming up she caught one of his now rather limp hands and put it on her left shoulder, saying "Hold tight. A few strokes will do it."

Kay, who was no fool and who had known that he was beaten, held tight, throwing all his exhausted strength into striking out with his other three limbs.

They were carried round the point, beyond reach of it had not Barry's outstretched hand been ready. Nan touched it, barely grasped it, just and no more, as they were swung seawards. It was enough. It pulled them to the rock's side. Again Nan wriggled and scrambled up, and then they dragged Kay heavily after them as he fainted.

"Neat," said Barry to Nan, his appreciation of a well-handled job, his love of spirit and skill, rising as it were to cheer, in spite of his exhaustion and his concern for Gerda and Kay. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman."

"He does faint sometimes," said Gerda of Kay. "He'll be all right in a minute."

Kay came to.

"Oh Lord," he said, "that was a bit of a grind." And then, becoming garrulous with the weak and fatuous garrulity of those who have recently swooned, "Couldn't have done it without you, Nan. I'd given myself up for lost. All my past life went by me in a flash.... I really did think it was U.P. with me, you know. And it jolly nearly was, for all of us, wasn't it?... Whose idea was it bathing just here? Yours, Nan. Of course. It would be. No wonder you felt our lives on your conscience and had to rescue us all. Oh Lord, the water I've drunk! I do feel rotten."

"We all look pretty rotten, I must say," Nan commented, looking from Kay's limp greenness to Gerda's shivering blueness, from Gerda to Barry, prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs cut by rocks in the sea. "I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of you from prostration, and all of us from cold. Are we well enough to scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?"

"We're not well enough for anything," Barry returned. "But we'd better do it. We don't want to die here, with the sea washing over us in this damp way."

They climbed weakly up to the top of the rock promontory, and along it till they dropped down into the little cove. They all felt beaten and limp, as if they had been playing a violent but not heating game of football. Even Nan's energy was drained.

Gerda said with chattering teeth, as she and Nan dressed in their rocky corner, "I suppose, Nan, if it hadn't been for you and Barry, I'd have drowned."

"Well, I suppose perhaps you would. If you come to think of it, we'd most of us be dying suddenly half the time if it weren't for something—some chance or other."

Gerda said "Thanks awfully, Nan," in her direct, childlike way, and Nan turned it off with "You might have thanked me if you had drowned, seeing it was my fault we bathed there at all. I ought to have known it wasn't safe for you or Kay."

Looking at the little fragile figure shivering in its vest, Nan felt in that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville's little pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda's hand clutched her shoulder in the sea.

"Life-saving seems to soften the heart," she reflected, grimly, conscious as always of her own reactions.

"Well," said Kay weakly, as they climbed up the cliff path to the little village, "I do call that a rotten bathe. Now let's make for the pub and drink whiskey."

7

It was three days later. They had spent an afternoon and a night at Polperro, and the sun shone in the morning on that incredible place as they rode out of it after breakfast. Polperro shakes the soul and the aesthetic nerves like a glass of old wine; no one can survey it unmoved, or leave it as he entered it, any more than you can come out of a fairy ring as you went in. In the afternoon they had bathed in the rock pools along the coast. In the evening the moon had magically gleamed on the little town, and Barry and Gerda had sat together on the beach watching it, and then in the dawn they had risen (Barry and Gerda again) and rowed out in a boat to watch the pilchard haul, returning at breakfast time sleepy, fishy and bright-eyed.

As they climbed the steep hill path that leads to Talland, the sun danced on the little harbour with its fishing-boats and its sad, crowding, crying gulls, and on the huddled white town with its narrow crooked streets and overhanging houses: Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream or of a little foreign port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the gorse and bracken by the steep path's edge to fragrance. So steep the path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file. It was never meant for cyclists, only for walkers; the bicycling road ran far inland.

They reached the cliff's highest point, and looked down on Talland Bay. By the side of the path, on a grass plateau, a stone war-cross reared grey against a blue sky, with its roll of names, and its comment—"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."

The path, become narrower, rougher and more winding, plunged sharply, steeply downwards, running perilously along the cliff's edge. Nan got on her bicycle.

Barry called from the rear, "Nan! It can't be done! It's not rideable.... Don't be absurd."

Nan, remarking casually "It'll be rideable if I ride it," began to do so.

"Madwoman," Barry said, and Kay assured him, "Nan'll be all right. No one else would, but she's got nine lives, you know."

Gerda came next behind Nan. For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching Nan's flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath, between the hill and the sea. A false swerve, a failure to turn with the path, and one would fly off the cliff's edge into space, fall down perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.

To refuse Nan's lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before Barry. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman!" Barry had said, coughing weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea. That phrase, and the ring in his hoarse voice as he said it, had stayed with Gerda.

She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.

"My God!" It was Barry's voice again, from the rear. "Stop, Gerda ... oh, you little fool.... Stop...."

But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried. She was in full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.

Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in her mind as she rushed.

"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."

She took the first sharp turn, and the second. The third, a right angle bending inward from the cliff's very edge, she did not take. She dashed on instead, straight into space, like a young Phoebus riding a horse of the morning through the blue air.

8

Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices crying out. Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings. She left her bicycle at the path's side and turned and ran up. Rounding a sharp bend, she saw them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge half-way down to the sea, a tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.

The next turn of the path hid them from sight again. But in two minutes she had reached the place where their two bicycles lay flung across the path, and was scrambling after them down the cliff.

When she reached them they had disentangled Gerda and the bicycle, and Barry held Gerda in his arms. She was unconscious, and a cut in her head was bleeding, darkening her yellow hair, trickling over her colourless face. Her right leg and her left arm lay stiff and oddly twisted.

Barry, his face drawn and tense, said "We must get her up to the path before she comes to, if possible. It'll hurt like hell if she's conscious."

They had all learnt how to help their fellow creatures in distress, and how you must bind broken limbs to splints before you move their owner so much as a yard. The only splint available for Gerda's right leg was her left, and they bound it tightly to this with three handkerchiefs, then tied her left arm to her side with Nan's stockings, and used the fourth handkerchief (which was Gerda's, and the cleanest) for her head. She came to before the arm was finished, roused to pained consciousness by the splinting process, and lay with clenched teeth and wet forehead, breathing sharply but making no other sound.

Then Barry lifted her in his arms and the others supported her on either side, and they climbed slowly and gently up to the path, not by the sheer way of their descent but by a diagonal track that joined the path further down.

"I'm sorry, darling," Barry said through his teeth when he jolted her. "I'm frightfully sorry.... Only a little more now."

They reached the path and Barry laid her down on the grass by its side, her head supported on Nan's knee.

"Very bad, isn't it?" said Barry gently, bending over her.

She smiled up at him, with twisted lips.

"Not so bad, really."

"You little sportsman," said Barry, softly and stooping, he kissed her pale cheek.

Then he stood up and spoke to Nan.

"I'm going to fetch a doctor if there's one in Talland. Kay must ride back and fetch the Polperro doctor, in case there isn't. In any case I shall bring up help and a stretcher from Talland and have her taken down."

He picked up his bicycle and stood for a moment looking down at the face on Nan's knee.

"You'll look after her," he said, quickly, and got on the bicycle and dashed down the path, showing that he too could do that fool's trick if it served any good purpose.

Gerda, watching him, caught her breath and forgot pain in fear until, swerving round the next bend, he was out of sight.

9

Nan sat very still by the path, staring over the sea, shading Gerda's head from the sun. There was nothing more to be done than that; there was no water, even, to bathe the cut with.

"Nan."

"Yes?"

"Am I much hurt? How much hurt, do you think?"

"I don't know how much. I think the arm is broken. The leg may be only sprained. Then there's the cut—I daresay that isn't very much—but one can't tell that."

"I must have come an awful mucker," Gerda murmured, after a pause. "It must have looked silly, charging over the edge like that.... You didn't."

"No. I didn't."

"It was stupid," Gerda breathed, and shut her eyes.

"No, not stupid. Anyone might have. It was a risky game to try."

"You tried it."

"Oh, I ... I do try things. That's no reason why you should.... You'd better not talk. Lie quite quiet. It won't be very long now before they come.... The pain's bad, I know."

Gerda's head was hot and felt giddy. She moved it restlessly. Urgent thoughts pestered her; her normal reticences lay like broken fences about her.

"Nan."

"Yes. Shall I raise your head a little?"

"No, it's all right.... About Barry, Nan."

Nan grew rigid, strung up to endure.

"And what about Barry?"

"Just that I love him. I love him very much; beyond anything in the world."

"Yes. You'd better not talk, all the same."

"Nan, do you love him too?"

Nan laughed, a queer little curt laugh in her throat.

"Rather a personal question, don't you think? Suppose, by any chance that I did? But of course I don't."

"But doesn't he love you, Nan? He did, didn't he?"

"My dear, I think you're rather delirious. This isn't the way one talks.... You'd better ask Barry the state of his affections, since you're interested in them. I'm not, particularly."

Gerda drew a long breath, of pain or fatigue or relief.

"I'm rather glad you don't care for him. I thought we might have shared him if you had, and if he'd cared for us both. But it might have been difficult."

"It might; you never know.... Well, you're welcome to my share, if you want it."

Then Gerda lay quiet, with closed eyes and wet forehead, and concentrated wholly on her right leg, which was hurting badly.

Nan too sat quiet, and she too was concentrating.

Irrevocably it was over now; done, finished with. Barry's eyes, Barry's kiss, had told her that. Gerda, the lovely, the selfish child, had taken Barry from her, to keep for always. Walked into Barry's office, into Barry's life, and deliberately stolen him. Thinking, she said, that they might share him.... The little fool. The little thief. (She waved the flies away from Gerda's head.)

And even this other game, this contest of physical prowess, had ended in a hollow, mocking victory for the winner, since defeat had laid the loser more utterly in her lover's arms, more unshakably in his heart. Gerda, defeated and broken, had won everything. Won even that tribute which had been Nan's own. "You little sportsman," Barry had called her, with a break of tenderness in his voice. Even that, even the palm for valour, he had placed in her hands. The little victor. The greedy little grabber of other people's things....

Gerda moaned at last.

"Only a little longer," said Nan, and laid her hand lightly and coolly on the hot wet forehead.

The little winner... damn her....

The edge of a smile, half-ironic, wholly bitter, twisted at Nan's lips.

10

Voices and steps. Barry and a doctor, Barry and a stretcher, Barry and all kinds of help. Barry's anxious eyes and smile. "Well? How's she been?"

He was on his knees beside her.

"Here's the doctor, darling.... I'm sorry I've been so long."



CHAPTER X

PRINCIPLES

1

Through the late September and October days Gerda would lie on a wicker couch in the conservatory at Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken wrist on a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat pears. Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of course—but particularly pears. She also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in pen and ink, and read Sir Leo Chiozza Money's "Triumph of Nationalisation" and Mrs. Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and "Lady Adela," and "Coterie," and listened while Neville read Mr. W.H. Mallock's "Memoirs" and Disraeli's "Life." Her grandmother (Rodney's mother) sent her "The Diary of Opal Whiteley," but so terrible did she find it that it caused a relapse, and Neville had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in vain with a modern novel, which she usually renounced in perplexity after three chapters or so. Her taste did not lie in this direction.

"I can't understand what they're all about," she said to Neville. "Poetry means something. It's about something real, something that really is so. So are books like this—" she indicated "The Triumph of Nationalisation." "But most novels are so queer. They're about people, but not people as they are. They're not interesting."

"Not as a rule, certainly. Occasionally one gets an idea out of one of them, or a laugh, or a thrill. Now and then they express life, or reality, or beauty, in some terms or other—but not as a rule."

Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers, shockers, and ingenious crime and mystery stories with avidity. She did not believe that life was really much like that, and Kay's assertion that if it weren't it ought to be, she rightly regarded as pragmatical. Neither did she share Kay's more fundamental taste for the Elizabethans, Carolines and Augustans. She and Kay met (as regards literature) only on economics, politics, and modern verse. Gerda's mind was artistic rather than literary, and she felt no wide or acute interest in human beings, their actions, passions, foibles, and desires.

So, surrounded by books from the Times library, and by nearly all the weekly and monthly reviews (the Bendishes, like many others, felt, with whatever regret, that they had to see all of these), Gerda for the most part, when alone, lay and dreamed dreams and ate pears.

2

Barry came down for week-ends. He and Gerda had declared their affections towards one another even at the Looe infirmary, where Gerda had been conveyed from the scene of accident. It had been no moment then for anything more definite than statements of reciprocal emotion, which are always cheering in sickness. But when Gerda was better, well enough, in fact, to lie in the Windover conservatory, Barry came down from town and said, "When shall we get married?"

Then Gerda, who had had as yet no time or mind-energy to reflect on the probable, or rather certain, width of the gulf between the sociological theories of herself and Barry, opened her blue eyes wide and said "Married?"

"Well, isn't that the idea? You can't jilt me now, you know; matters have gone too far."

"But, Barry, I thought you knew. I don't hold with marriage."

Barry threw back his head and laughed, because she looked so innocent and so serious and young as she lay there among the pears and bandages.

"All right, darling. You've not needed to hold with it up till now. But now you'd better catch on to it as quickly as you can, and hold it tight, because it's what's going to happen."

Gerda moved her bandaged head in denial.

"Oh, no, Barry. I can't.... I thought you knew. Haven't we ever talked about marriage before?"

"Oh, probably. Yes, I think I've heard you and Kay both on the subject. You don't hold with legal ties in what should be purely a matter of emotional impulse, I know. But crowds of people talk like that and then get married. I've no doubt Kay will too, when his time comes."

"Kay won't. He thinks marriage quite wrong. And so do I."

Barry, who had stopped laughing, settled himself to talk it out.

"Why wrong, Gerda? Superfluous, if you like; irrelevant, if you like; but why wrong?"

"Because it's a fetter on what shouldn't be fettered. Love might stop. Then it would be ugly."

"Oh very. One has to take that risk, like other risks. And love is really more likely to stop, as I see it, if there's no contract in the eyes of the world, if the two people know each can walk away from the other, and is expected to, directly they quarrel or feel a little bored. The contract, the legalisation—absurd and irrelevant as all legal things are to anything that matters—the contract, because we're such tradition-bound creatures, does give a sort of illusion of inevitability, which is settling, so that it doesn't occur to the people to fly apart at the first strain. They go through with it instead, and in nine cases out of ten come out on the other side. In the tenth case they just have either to make the best of it or to make a break.... Of course people always can throw up the sponge, even married people, if things are insupportable. The door isn't locked. But there's no point, I think, in having it swinging wide open."

"I think it should be open," Gerda said. "I think people should be absolutely free.... Take you and me. Suppose you got tired of me, or liked someone else better, I think you ought to be able to leave me without any fuss."

That was characteristic of both of them, that they could take their own case theoretically without becoming personal, without lovers' protestations to confuse the general issue.

"Well," Barry said, "I don't think I ought. I think it should be made as difficult for me as possible. Because of the children. There are usually children, of course. If I left you, I should have to leave them too. Then they'd have no father. Or, if it were you that went, they'd have no mother. Either way it's a pity, normally. Also, even if we stayed together always and weren't married, they'd have no legal name. Children often miss that, later on. Children of the school age are the most conventional, hide-bound creatures. They'd feel ashamed before their schoolfellows."

"I suppose they'd have my name legally, wouldn't they?"

"I suppose so. But they might prefer mine. The other boys and girls would have their fathers', you see."

"Not all of them. I know several people who don't hold with marriage either; there'd be all their children. And anyhow it's not a question of what the children would prefer while they were at school. It's what's best for them. And anything would be better than to see their parents hating each other and still having to live together."

"Yes. Anything would be better than that. Except that it would be a useful and awful warning to them. But the point is, most married people don't hate each other. They develop a kind of tolerating, companionable affection, after the first excitement called being in love is past—so far as it does pass. That's mostly good enough to live on; that and common interests and so forth. It's the stuff of ordinary life; the emotional excitement is the hors d'oeuvre. It would be greedy to want to keep passing on from one hors d'oeuvre to another—leaving the meal directly the joint comes in."

"I like dessert best," Gerda said, irrelevantly, biting into an apple.

"Well, you'd never get any at that rate. Nor much of the rest of the meal either."

"But people do, Barry. Free unions often last for years and years—sometimes forever. Only you wouldn't feel tied. You'd be sure you were only living together because you both liked to, not because you had to."

"I should feel I had to, however free it was. So you wouldn't have that consolation about me. I might be sick of you, and pining for someone else, but still I should stay."

"Why, Barry?"

"Because I believe in permanent unions, as a general principle. They're more civilised. It's unusual, uncivic, dotting about from one mate to another, leaving your young and forgetting all about them and having new ones. Irresponsible, I call it. Living only for a good time. It's not the way to be good citizens, as I see it, nor to bring up good citizens.... Oh, I know that the whole question of sex relationships is horribly complicated, and can't be settled with a phrase or a dogma. It's been for centuries so wrapped in cant and humbug and expediencies and camouflage; I don't profess to be able to pierce through all that, or to so much as begin to think it out clearly. The only thing I can fall back on as a certainty is the children question. A confused and impermanent family life must be a bad background for the young. They want all they can get of both their parents, in the way of education and training and love."

"Family life is such a hopeless muddle, anyhow."

"A muddle, yes. Hopeless, no. Look at your own. Your father and mother have always been friends with each other and with you. They brought you up with definite ideas about what they wanted you to become—fairly well thought-out and consistent ideas, I suppose. I don't say they could do much—parents never can—but something soaks in."

"Usually something silly and bad."

"Often, yes. Anyhow a queer kind of mixed brew. But at least the parents have their chance. It's what they're there for; they've got to do all they know, while the children are young, to influence them towards what they personally believe, however mistakenly, to be the finest points of view. Of course lots of it is, as you say, silly and bad, because people are largely silly and bad. But no parent can be absolved from doing his or her best."

Barry was walking round the conservatory, eager and full of faith and hope and fire, talking rapidly, the educational enthusiast, the ardent citizen, the social being, the institutionalist, all over. He was all these things; he was rooted and grounded in citizenship, in social ethics. He stopped by the couch and stood looking down at Gerda among her fruit, his hands in his pockets, his eyes bright and lit.

"All the same, darling, I shall never want to fetter you. If you ever want to leave me, I shan't come after you. The legal tie shan't stand in your way. And to me it would make no difference; I shouldn't leave you in any case, married or not. So I don't see how or why you score in doing without the contract."

"It's the idea of the thing, partly. I don't want to wear a wedding ring and be Mrs. Briscoe. I want to be Gerda Bendish, living with Barry Briscoe because we like to.... I expect, Barry, in my case it would be for always, because, at present, I can't imagine stopping caring more for you than for anything else. But that doesn't affect the principle of the thing. It would be wrong for me to marry you. One oughtn't to give up one's principles just because it seems all right in a particular case. It would be cheap and shoddy and cowardly."

"Exactly," said Barry, "what I feel. I can't give up my principle either, you know. I've had mine longer than you've had yours."

"I've had mine since I was about fifteen."

"Five years. Well, I've had mine for twenty. Ever since I first began to think anything out, that is."

"People of your age," said Gerda, "people over thirty, I mean, often think like that about marriage. I've noticed it. So has Kay."

"Observant infants. Well, there we stand, then. One of us has got either to change his principles—her principles, I mean—or to be false to them. Or else, apparently, there can be nothing doing between you and me. That's the position, isn't it?"

Gerda nodded, her mouth full of apple.

"It's very awkward," Barry continued, "my having fallen in love with you. I had not taken your probable views on sociology into account. I knew that, though we differed in spelling and punctuation, we were agreed (approximately) on politics, economics, and taste in amusements, and I thought that was enough. I forgot that divergent views on matrimony were of practical importance. It would have mattered less if I had discovered that you were a militarist and imperialist and quoted Marx at me."

"I did tell you, Barry. I really did. I never hid it. And I never supposed that you'd want to marry me."

"That was rather stupid of you. I'm so obviously a marrying man.... Now, darling, will you think the whole thing out from the beginning, after I've gone? Be first-hand; don't take over theories from other people, and don't be sentimental about it. Thrash the whole subject out with yourself and with other people—with your own friends, and with your family too. They're a modern, broad-minded set, your people, after all; they won't look at the thing conventionally; they'll talk sense; they won't fob you off with stock phrases, or talk about the sanctity of the home. They're not institutionalists. Only be fair about it; weigh all the pros and cons, and judge honestly, and for heaven's sake don't look at the thing romantically, or go off on theories because they sound large and subversive. Think of practical points, as well as of ultimate principles. Both, to my mind, are on the same side. I'm not asking you to sacrifice right for expediency, or expediency for right. I don't say 'Be sensible,' or 'Be idealistic.' We've got to be both."

"Barry, I've thought and talked about it so often and so long. You don't know how much we do talk about that sort of thing, at the club and everywhere and Kay and I. I could never change my mind."

"What a hopeless admission! We ought to be ready to change our minds at any moment; they should be as changeable as pound notes."

"What about yours, then, darling?"

"I'm always ready to change mine. I shall think the subject out too, and if I do change I shall tell you at once."

"Barry." Gerda's face was grave; her forehead was corrugated. "Suppose we neither of us ever change? Suppose we both go on thinking as we do now for always? What then?"

He smoothed the knitted forehead with his fingers.

"Then one of us will have to be a traitor to his or her principles. A pity, but sometimes necessary in this complicated world. Or, if we can neither of us bring ourselves down to that, I suppose eventually we shall each perpetrate with someone else the kind of union we personally prefer."

They parted on that. The thing had not grown serious yet; they could still joke about it.

3

Though Gerda said "What's the use of my talking about it to people when I've made up my mind?" and though she had not the habit of talking for conversation's sake, she did obediently open the subject with her parents, in order to assure herself beyond a doubt what they felt about it. But she knew already that their opinions were what you might expect of parents, even of broad-minded, advanced parents, who rightly believed themselves not addicted to an undiscriminating acceptance of the standards and decisions of a usually mistaken world. But Barry was wrong in saying they weren't institutionalists; they were. Parents are.

Rodney was more opinionated than Neville, on this subject as on most others. He said, crossly, "It's a beastly habit, unlegitimatised union. When I say beastly, I mean beastly; nothing derogatory, but merely like the beasts—the other beasts, that is."

Gerda said "Well, that's not really an argument against it. In that sense it's beastly when we sleep out instead of in bed, or do lots of other quite nice things. The way men and women do things isn't necessarily the best way," and there Rodney had to agree with her. He fell back on "It's unbusinesslike. Suppose you have children?" and Gerda, who had supposed all that with Barry, sighed. Rodney said a lot more, but it made little impression on her, beyond corroborating her views on the matrimonial theories of middle-aged people.

Neville made rather more. To Neville Gerda said "How can I go back on everything I've always said and thought about it, and go and get married? It would be so reactionary."

Neville, who had a headache and was irritable, said "It's the other thing that's reactionary. It existed long before the marriage tie did. That's what I don't understand about all you children who pride yourselves on being advanced. If you frankly take your stand on going back to nature, on being reactionary—well, it is, anyhow, a point of view, and has its own merits. But your minds seem to me to be in a hopeless muddle. You think you're going forward while you're really going back."

"Marriage," said Gerda, "is so Victorian. It's like antimacassars."

"Now, my dear, do you mean anything by either of those statements? Marriage wasn't invented in Victoria's reign. Nor did it occur more frequently in that reign than it had before or does now. Why Victorian, then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. How can a legal contract be like a doyley on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds like a riddle, only there's no answer. No, you know you've got no answer. That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle-headedness. Why are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That's another riddle."

"That's what Nan says. She told me once that she used to be sentimental when she was twenty. Was she?"

"More than she is now, anyhow."

Neville's voice was a little curt. She was not happy about Nan, who had just gone to Rome for the winter.

"Well," Gerda said, "anyhow I'm not sentimental about not meaning to marry. I've thought about it for years, and I know."

"Thought about it! Much you know about it." Neville, tired and cross from over-work, was, unlike herself, playing the traditional conventional mother. "Have you thought how it will affect your children, for instance?"

Those perpetual, tiresome children. Gerda was sick of them.

"Oh yes, I've thought a lot about that. And I can't see it will hurt them. Barry and I talked for ever so long about the children. So did father."

So did Neville.

"Of course I know," she said, "that you and Kay would be only too pleased if father and I had never been married, but you've no right to judge by yourself the ones you and Barry may have. They may not be nearly so odd.... And then there's your own personal position. The world's full of people who think they can insult a man's mistress."

"I don't meet people like that. The people I know don't insult other people for not being married. They think it's quite natural, and only the people's own business."

"You've moved in a small and rarefied clique so far, my dear. You'll meet the other kind of people presently; one can't avoid them, the world's so full of them."

"Do they matter?"

"Of course they matter. As mosquitoes matter, and wasps, and cars that splash mud at you in the road. You'd be constantly annoyed. Your own scullery maid would turn up her nose at you. The man that brought the milk will sneer."

"I don't think," Gerda said, after reflection, "that I'm very easily annoyed. I don't notice things, very often. I think about other things rather a lot, you see. That's why I'm slow at answering."

"Well, Barry would be annoyed, anyhow."

"Barry does lots of unpopular things. He doesn't mind what people say."

"He'd mind for you.... But Barry isn't going to do it. Barry won't have you on your terms. If you won't have him on his, he'll leave you and go and find some nicer girl."

"I can't help it, mother. I can't do what I don't approve of for that. How could I?"

"No, darling, of course you couldn't; I apologise. But do try and see if you can't get to approve of it, or anyhow to be indifferent about it. Such a little thing! It isn't as if Barry wanted you to become a Mormon or something.... And after all you can't accuse him of being retrograde, or Victorian, if you like to use that silly word, or lacking in ideals for social progress—can you? He belongs to nearly all your illegal political societies, doesn't he? Why, his house gets raided for leaflets from time to time. I don't think they ever find any, but they look, and that's something. You can't call Barry hide-bound or conventionally orthodox."

"No. Oh no. Not that. Or I shouldn't be caring for him. But he doesn't understand about this. And you don't, mother, nor father, nor anyone of your ages. I don't know how it is, but it is so."

"You might try your Aunt Rosalind," Neville suggested, with malice.

Gerda shuddered. "Aunt Rosalind ... she wouldn't understand at all...."

But the dreadful thought was, as Neville had intended, implanted in her that, of all her elder relatives, it was only Aunt Rosalind who, though she mightn't understand, might nevertheless agree. Aunt Rosalind on free unions... that would be terrible to have to hear. For Aunt Rosalind would hold with them not because she thought them right but because she enjoyed them—the worst of reasons. Gerda somehow felt degraded by the introduction into the discussion of Aunt Rosalind, whom she hated, whom she knew, without having been told so, that her mother and all of them hated. It dragged it down, made it vulgar.

Gerda lay back in silence, the springs of argument and talk dried in her. She wanted Kay.

It was no use; they couldn't meet. Neville could not get away from her traditions, nor Gerda from hers.

Neville, to change the subject (though scarcely for the better), read her "The Autobiography of Mrs. Asquith" till tea-time.

4

They all talked about it again, and said the same things, and different things, and more things, and got no nearer one another with it all. Soon Barry and Gerda, each comprehending the full measure of the serious intent of the other, stood helpless before it, the one in half-amused exasperation, the other in obstinate determination.

"She means business, then," thought Barry. "He won't come round," thought Gerda and their love pierced and stabbed them, making Barry hasty of speech and Gerda sullen.

"The waste of it," said Barry, on Sunday evening, "when I've only got one day in the week, to spend it quarrelling about marriage. I've hundreds of things to talk about and tell you—interesting things, funny things—but I never get to them, with all this arguing we have to have first."

"I don't want to argue, Barry. Let's not. We've said everything now, lots of times. There can't be any more. Tell me your things instead!"

He told her, and they were happy talking, and forgot how they thought differently on marriage. But always the difference lay there in the background, coiled up like a snake, ready to uncoil and seize them and make them quarrel and hurt one another. Always one was expecting the other at any moment to throw up the sponge and cry "Oh, have it your own way, since you won't have it mine and I love you." But neither did. Their wills stood as stiff as two rocks over against one another.

Gerda grew thinner under the strain, and healed more slowly than before. Her fragile, injured body was a battle-ground between her will and her love, and suffered in the conflict. Barry saw that it could not go on. They would, he said, stop talking about it; they would put it in the background and go on as if it were not there, until such time as they could agree. So they became friends again, lovers who lived in the present and looked to no future, and, since better might not be, that had to do for the time.



CHAPTER XI

THAT WHICH REMAINS

1

Through September Neville had nursed Gerda by day and worked by night. The middle of October, just when they usually moved into town for the winter, she collapsed, had what the doctor called a nervous breakdown.

"You've been overworking," he told her. "You're not strong enough in these days to stand hard brain-work. You must give it up."

For a fortnight she lay tired and passive, surrendered and inert, caring for nothing but to give up and lie still and drink hot milk. Then she struggled up and mooned about the house and garden, and cried weakly from time to time, and felt depressed and bored, and as if life were over and she were at the bottom of the sea.

"This must be what mother feels," she thought. "Poor mother.... I'm like her; I've had my life, and I'm too stupid to work, and I can only cry.... Men must work and women must weep.... I never knew before that that was true.... I mustn't see mother just now, it would be the last straw ... like the skeletons people used to look at to warn themselves what they would come to.... Poor mother ... and poor me.... But mother's getting better now she's being analysed. That wouldn't help me at all. I analyse myself too much already.... And I was so happy a few months ago. What a dreadful end to a good ambition. I shall never work again, I suppose, in any way that counts. So that's that.... Why do I want to work and to do something? Other wives and mothers don't.... Or do they, only they don't know it, because they don't analyse? I believe they do, lots of them. Or is it only my horrible egotism and vanity, that can't take a back seat quietly? I was always like that, I know. Nan and I and Gilbert. Not Jim so much, and not Pamela at all. But Rodney's worse than I am; he wouldn't want to be counted out, put on the shelf, in the forties; he'd be frightfully sick if he had to stand by and see other people working and getting on and in the thick of things when he wasn't. He couldn't bear it; he'd take to drink, I think.... I hope Rodney won't ever have a nervous breakdown and feel like this, poor darling, he'd be dreadfully tiresome.... Not to work after all. Not to be a doctor.... What then? Just go about among people, grinning like a dog. Winter in town, talking, dining, being the political wife. Summer in the country, walking, riding, reading, playing tennis. Fun, of course. But what's it all for? When I've got Gerda off my hands I shall have done being a mother, in any sense that matters. Is being a wife enough to live for? Rodney's wife? Oh, I want to be some use, want to do things, to count.... And Rodney will die some time—I know he'll die first—and then I shan't even be a wife. And in twenty years I shan't be able to do things with my body much more, and what then? What will be left? ... I think I'm getting hysterical, like poor mother.... How ugly I look, these days."

She stopped before the looking-glass. Her face looked back at her, white and thin, almost haggard, traced in the last few weeks for the first time with definite lines round brow and mouth. Her dark hair was newly streaked with grey.

"Middle age," said Neville, and a cold hand was laid round her heart. "It had to come some time, and this illness has opened the door to it. Or shall I look young again when I'm quite well? No, never young again."

She shivered.

"I look like mother to-day.... I am like mother...."

So youth and beauty were to leave her, too. She would recover from this illness and this extinguishing of charm, but not completely, and not for long. Middle age had begun. She would have off days in future, when she would look old and worn instead of always, as hitherto, looking charming. She wouldn't, in future, be sure of herself; people wouldn't be sure to think "A lovely woman, Mrs. Rodney Bendish." Soon they would be saying "How old Mrs. Bendish is getting to look," and then "She was a pretty woman once."

Well, looks didn't matter much really, after all....

"They do, they do," cried Neville to the glass, passionately truthful. "If you're vain they do—and I am vain. Vain of my mind and of my body.... Vanity, vanity, all is vanity ... and now the silver cord is going to be loosed and the golden bowl is going to be broken, and I shall be hurt."

Looks did matter. It was no use canting, and minimising them. They affected the thing that mattered most—one's relations with people. Men, for instance, cared more to talk to a woman whose looks pleased them. They liked pretty girls, and pretty women. Interesting men cared to talk to them: they told them things they would never tell a plain woman. Rodney did. He liked attractive women. Sometimes he made love to them, prettily and harmlessly.

The thought of Rodney stabbed her. If Rodney were to get to care less ... to stop making love to her ... worse, to stop needing her.... For he did need her; through all their relationship, disappointing in some of its aspects, his need had persisted, a simple, demanding thing.

Humour suddenly came back.

"This, I suppose, is what Gerda is anticipating, and why she won't have Barry tied to her. If Rodney wasn't tied to me he could flee from my wrinkles...."

"Oh, what an absurd fuss one makes. What does any of it matter? It's all in the course of nature, and the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep. Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one's fairly in it.... I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as if I'd been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy.... That's the worst of being a vain creature.... What will Rosalind do when her time comes? Oh, paint, of course, and dye—more thickly than she does now, I mean. She'll be a ghastly sight. A raddled harridan. At least I shall always look respectable, I hope. I shall go down to Gerda. I want to look at something young. The young have their troubles, poor darlings, but they don't know how lucky they are."

2

In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored.

What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one's bit, making one's work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course, full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or other—that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however similar its ultimate aim, could never be.