lf between my love-making and yours. Yours was romance; mine
will be prose. I'm not running it down--a very good kind of prose, but
well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox's
faults. He's afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too
little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn't sympathy
really. I'd even say "--she looked at the shining lagoons--"that,
spiritually, he's not as honest as I am. Doesn't that satisfy you?"

"No, it doesn't," said Helen. "It makes me feel worse and worse. You
must be mad."

Margaret made a movement of irritation.

"I don't intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life--good
heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn't, and shall
never, understand."

Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union,
before the astonishing glass shade had fallen that interposes between
married couples and the world. She was to keep her independence more
than do most women as yet. Marriage was to alter her fortunes rather
than her character, and she was not far wrong in boasting that she
understood her future husband. Yet he did alter her character--a little.
There was an unforeseen surprise, a cessation of the winds and odours of
life, a social pressure that would have her think conjugally.

"So with him," she continued. "There are heaps of things in him--more
especially things that he does that will always be hidden from me. He
has all those public qualities which you so despise and which enable all
this--" She waved her hand at the landscape, which confirmed anything.
"If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years,
you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would
be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields
even. Just savagery. No--perhaps not even that. Without their spirit
life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse
to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it. There are times
when it seems to me--"

"And to me, and to all women. So one kissed Paul."

"That's brutal." said 'Margaret. "Mine is an absolutely different case.
I've thought things out."

"It makes no difference thinking things out. They come to the same."

"Rubbish!"

There was a long silence, during which the tide returned into Poole
Harbour. "One would lose something," murmured Helen, apparently to
herself. The water crept ove