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But he wrenched himself loose from her and managed to* get the door open. She followed him into the garden; and a breath of cold night air floated into that whiskey-smelling room.

Dave stood there motionless, hesitating whether to follow them or not. How calm and impersonal looked that little book about Atlantis lying on the table face-down and open!

“Let 'un alone, Mr. Spear,” cried Zookey. " 'Twill only vex ?un worse for thee to meddle. Her can quiet him. Him won't hurt his Lordship's golden mug.w

Percy looked dreamily at her husband while her eyelids sank down . . . opened again . . . and sank down again.

Her lulled and drugged senses had drifted back to the hay-boat. Never had she felt like that before! Never had she given herself up like that before! She had not known the least Vfrffi thing about 'love.“ No wonder people made so much of it, and priests called it ”mortal sin!“ kTm sleepy,*' she thought—”I'd like to go to sleep in his arms. How strong he is! I'd like to melt away in his arms; and sleep . . . and sleep . . . and sleep . . ."

Meanwhile Nell was following Zoyland down the sloping lawn towards the river.

She was wearing a tight-fitting lavender-coloured dress with loose, beautifully cut sleeves. This particular dress she had seen in Wo 11 op's window and Mr. Wallop's head-seamstress had worked hard to alter it for her, against the day when she came out of the hospital.

She overtook him long before he reached the river bank and clung to him desperately and they struggled together, trampling upon her wild-flower bed and the last of her marjoram plants that were sinking down into the wet winter mould.

In the struggle between them, for he kept holding the little cup high up in the air and she kept dragging at his arm to reach it, it happened that one of her sleeves got caught in some way as they swayed together and was badly ripped, evoking as the fabric tore, that particular sound which is, of all others, the most agitating to a woman, when she is struggling—whether in love or in hate—with a man. The tearing of her dress and the ease with which Zoyland—even in his drunkenness—held the cup out of her reach caused Nell to lose her self-control completely.

She struck at his face again and again with her clenched hand; a proceeding which astonished him so much that he could only murmur, without attempting to defend himself, “Do it again, darling! Do it again, Nell!”

It is a memorable epoch in a man's life, the first time a woman strikes him in anger. In most cases a certain subtle link is broken between them that can never be mended. But there are exceptions to this.

In the relations between men and women the taking of virginity is undeniably the symbolic as well as the psychic root , of all complications. This act causes pleasure to the one and suffering to the other—therefore, when a woman strikes a man, a deeply hidden, basic relation is broken; and broken in a manner that, as a rule, is dangerous for both.

The Reverend Dr. Sodbury, Rector of St. Benignus', who was Megan Geard's favourite among “God's Ministers” as the lady put it, “in all Glaston,” in an eloquent sermon preached on the occasion when Mrs. Legge of Camelot, then in the prime of her life, was summoned for violently striking the father of Mr. Wollop, spoke of there being something in a woman's striking a man that was monstrous, perverted, unnatural, forbidden, impious, shocking, obscene and—the worthy Doctor in his original manuscript had added the word “bestial”; but in a later version he had modified this into:—“More proper to the insect world than to the world of humanity.”

“Do it again, darling! Do it again, Nell!” Zoyland was debarred from making any serious attempt to defend himself from these blows not only by gallantry but also by his obstinate efforts—natural to the gravity of drunkenness'— to keep the cup far out of her reach.

Into her blows Nell threw all the mounting tide of her feelings; feelings that had been gathering and gathering against Zoyland ever since Sam gave up making love to her, ever since her child's conception began. To the end of her life she remembered what she felt as she hit him. It was the sight of his beard in the moonlight, more than anything else, that made her repeat her blows so often. And each blow—as she felt the flesh she struck at yield under her knuckles—seemed to avenge her, and liberate her, and heal some deep hurt in her, and fulfil some profound necessity of her nature.

It was as if she were striking something more than Zoyland. It was as if she was striking at that whole procession of rank, hirsute, brutal, abominable men that she had seen that day, when in the first recognition of her maternity she had burnt up her brother's pamphlet—it was as if she were striking with her schoolgirl hand, all that unfair advantage that men possessed over women in this world; their easy escapes, their light-hearted irresponsibility, their shifting of burdens, their abysmal conceit. How she had hated that “thud . . . thud . . . thud. ? .” of her husband's heavy steps coming down those stairs! Well! It was with another "thud . . . thud . . . thud/' of her woman's knuckles against his bearded face, that she had countered that!

It was not, of course that the girl had time to feel all this in sequence; but she did feel the overpowering impetus of all this as she struck her blows.

The tearing of her dress was the raising of the sluice and the flood simply followed. The truth seems to be that the attraction between men and women lets down a drawbridge across a fretting current of hopeless differences that has only to be exposed to lead at once to these wdld outbursts.

As long as she had not met Sam, or known that there was a Sam in the world, there was enough sensuality in her to make Zoyland a tolerable partner. But when Sam and Sam's child came between them, Zoyland was thrust at once into that category of unilluminated maleness towards which it takes a born courtesan to be indulgent.

It was the appearance of Dave Spear's figure now—for the impersonalist had decided to disobey Zookey—that drove the tipsy giant to his next move.

“I said I'd christen 'ee, little cup,” he roared, “and so I willi How do 'ee like that?”

So speaking he ran down the slope of the moonlit lawn, treading carelessly on her rain-beaten patch of rosemary, and flung the golden cup clear into the middle of the misty stream.

There was a shriek of astounded dismay from Nell and a cry:—“What on earth------” from the bewildered Communist; and with a much smaller splash than anyone would have expected —in fact with hardly any splash at all—the “Doll's House Grail” as Mr. Evans had called it when he sold it to Lord P., sank down to the bottom of Whitelake River!

The spasm of her anger all spent now, only a sick disgust at his folly remained in Nell's mind. But this was enough to give her the final push to what she had been gathering up her courage to do all that agitated evening. She had not missed— no woman could have missed, not even one who loved another! —the vibrant aura of infatuation between Zoyland and Percy.

It had been her vision of their two faces as they drank that whiskey that had tipped the scale.

“Will,” she said very quietly when the two men, the one approaching her from the house and the other from the river, met at her side, “Will—listen!”

“I am listening; and so's brother Dave listening!” jeered Zoy-land.

But she went on in a steady ice-cold voice.

“I . . . am . . . going . . . to . . . leave . . . you,” she said. “I'm going to leave you . . . now . . . tonight. Dave is going to drive baby and me to—where I tell him—but that's not for you—and yet it is for you—yes—I'm going to the Vicarage. Mr. Dekker will take me in. I've had enough of this sort of thing, Will. But . . . but—” she hesitated for a second—“but . . . I'm sorry I hit you. I oughtn't to have done that. I don't know what came over me.”

Lord P.'s bastard drew a deep breath. The light from the drifting half-moon made his great bushy beard look twice as big as it did by day and his figure twice as formidable.

What passed through his mind like a falling star was the thought of Percy's naked body, alone with him in that little silent house.

“Very well, Nell,” he said, as quiet and composed as a man could be. “Very well, Nell.”

“I shall leave Mrs. Pippard here,” she went on, “you can keen her or let her go, just as you like------”

“I'm listening, Nell,” he repeated. “Very well, Nell.”

But she turned to her brother now. “Dave,” she said humbly and gently, “Dear Dave, I'm sorry to drag you into all this .... besides I know how you ... I know what we both . . .”

“Oh, it's all right, Nelly,” Dave cried hurriedly, anxious, above everything, to stop her from referring to Percy before Zoyland. "Well get off at once. Don't 'ee fret! We'll get off at once. Dekker's a fast walker. He'll be home before we're there. Don't 'ee fret, Nelly. The Vicarage won't hurt you for one night anyway , . . and we can see later ... we can all talk . . . reasonably and quietly . . . later . . . and try and see things . . . later . . . outside our own skin!3'

This expression "outside our own skin'5 came suddenly into Dave's head. It was his personal reaction from all this long day spent in stroking the electric skins of so many personalised animals!

“Don't 'ee fret, little Nell!” How many times in her earlier life had this absent-minded half-brother uttered these words! They brought more comfort to her now, in her distress and her shame, than she would have thought possible if she could have foreseen how this day was going to end. Dave put his arm shyly and stiffly round her waist. There were no directions in the Marxian philosophy—nor indeed in his Atlantis book—telling a reformer of society how to comfort a woman. But between his sister's soft waist under her torn sleeve and his own arm, just then, there seemed to be something spontaneously generated which was outside the sphere of reason.

Not more than an hour later Mrs. William Zoyland and Master Henry Sangamore Rollo Zoyland were safely deposited, together with a modicum of luggage, on the steps of the Vicarage front door.

It was the Vicar himself who opened the door to let them in.

The child, disturbed by the ceasing of the movement of the car, began to cry loudly; and in spite of her agitation his mother could not help recalling how, when they left Whitelake Cottage to the tune of Zookey Pippard's “oon, two, dree, vour,” her husband had said: “I know one person who'll miss me, Nell, in that monastery of yours!”—and how tenderly he had brushed the baby's face with his great yellow beard.

As for Dave Spear, he was free that night to read his Atlantis book till the candle in Dickery Cantle's third back bedroom burnt to the socket. But he read only three pages. It is hard to be impersonal in a cosmos that runs to personality*

Somersetshire manner.

Mild, open weather prevailed, so that Jackie and his robber band, exploring the Wick Woods for trapped rabbits, used frequently to drag the exhausted, but still enquiring Bert, home to his grandmother, with two or three untimely primrose buds clutched tight in his hot little palm.

But with the appearance of the New Year the barometer fell, and a series of sharp black frosts followed one another, constricting the damp Avalon clay and killing off these premature buddings. The lease of the bulk of his Glastonbury property to the reorganised town council realised for Lord P. so large a sum of ready money that he was able to establish his heavily taxed finances on a new and more satisfactory basis, and Will Zoy-land, with his new companion at Whitelake Cottage, got the benefit of this change in several substantial presents of money. The Marquis had never liked his son's wife and his sympathies were entirely with the bastard in the estrangement from Nell. Persephone on the contrary proved to be an adept at cajoling the great man. As to Bloody Johnny's fortune, the inroads upon it by these new transactions, were, thanks to the council's power of borrowing, much less than the Mayor had anticipated; and as the visitors from abroad, * attracted by John's advertisements, poured into the town all that winter in increasing numbers, the new Glastonbury commune, under the dictatorship of the Mayor's assessors, showed signs of being more than able to keep its proletariat satisfied and its tradesmen active and content.

The business done in Mr. Wollop's shop alone surpassed all the holiday seasons the ex-Mayor could remember, so that although his establishment did not oflicially come under the new regime, he was willing enough to hand over to the communal purse, sooner than break with the authorities, all the percentage they demanded of these increasing profits. The bank, the railway, Philip's older dye works, and his Wookey Hole tin mine, were therefore, as the early weeks of January passed, the only strongholds of individualism left untouched by the new order.

The official opening of Geard's Saxon arch and of a curious building near it which was really a sort of Platonic Academia for his new religion, but which, for want of a better name, was hitherto styled the Rotunda, was to take place on January the twentieth of this new year. So widely had John's clever circulars advertised this event, that by the morning of the great day every available lodging in the place was crowded, and those incorrigible capitalistic railways were running their loaded excursion trains into the town soon after daylight began.

“Are you really off to Wookey now?” enquired Mrs. Crow of her husband at an unusually late breakfast at The Elms. “Emma says there won't be a stroke of work done anywhere in the neighbourhood today.”

Tilly was not a little disturbed, for reasons of her own, at the lateness of the hour; but the master of the house had slept heavily that morning.

Philip looked across the table at her with his indulgent smile. How dear she was to him, after all, this quaint little lady for whom he felt no more erotic attraction than if she had been his aunt, like that Aunt Maria who had lived for the last thirty years at Aix-les-Bains! “You wouldn't want me to sit twiddling my thumbs at home, would you,” he said, “while Geard has his grand glorification?”

“Emma says she thinks you ought to be therel” In all the last decade of their relations Philip's wife had never dared to speak so decisively; but her private nervousness made things leap out that she had not meant to say. But her words troubled him. Had even she, then, joined the increasing circle of their neighbors who were drifting away from his side towards that of the Mayor? He glanced down frowningly at his plate. He began biting his underlip beneath its grey mustache. He felt hedged round by enemies, cornered, run to earth, like a hunted fox.