den-hair, that woke it with a rough shout in us and
offered us at the same time its natural gratification--a fierce fight
and a certain victory? God knows and knows better, perhaps, than the
Devil that Roger's ancestors would have been quick to credit with the
exclusive knowledge.

Civilisation and her mysterious daughter whom we call nowadays Culture
have tried to teach us that golf and lawn tennis and, for the
lustiest, fencing, or the control of a spirited horse, must best
translate in your house-broken citizen of forty the heat that surged
up in Roger then; but to most of us it becomes once or twice apparent
in our sidewalk career, our delicate journey from mahogany sideboards
to mahogany beds, that this teaching is idiotic to the last degree,
however strictly the police have enforced it; and we know that only
the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta, tenderly
hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness, brutally driving the pace
till her heart burst in her side if need be, tasted the supremest
ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above
the savage--the fight for joy. I am convinced that it is after some
one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year
of the world's life throws his chest weights out of window, settles
his tailor's bill, and is off for Africa or Greenland with a hatchet
and a cartridge belt. We become thus inscrutable to our maiden aunts
and it may be to ourselves, a little, when we discover that it was not
quite exactly the struggle for food and shelter, the fight against the
cliffs and elements and animals that we went out into the wilderness
to seek. But we are in any event less unreasonable than those belated
and blindfolded ones among us who translate the implacable desire too
literally and lose its meaning utterly in the garbled text of the
midnight city streets.

Roger literally fell upon this vixenish, beautiful creature with the
perfectly definite intention of shaking her until her teeth chattered
in her head, but he did not achieve this result, for the reason that
Margarita fought like a demon; fought, her hands being pinioned, with
her supple back, her strong shoulders and her rigid knees. It was like
struggling with a malicious little girl of six and a stubborn boy of
sixteen rolled into one. She did not cry nor chatter but set her teeth
and directed all her superb energy to the actual business in hand. His
idea of grasping both h