hod or purpose, so did these; and just as with young
animals the sexes mingle without any hint of sexuality, so did these.
If there was love-making I saw nothing of it there. They met on exact
equality so far as I could judge, the male not desirous, the female
not conscious of being desired.

But it was a mad business under the cloudy moon. It had a dream-like
element of riot and wild triumph. I suppose I must have been there for
two or three hours, during all which time their swift play was never
altogether stopped. There were interludes to be seen, when some three
or four grew suddenly tired and fell out. They threw themselves down
on the sward and lay panting, beaming, watching the others, or they
disappeared into the dark and were lost in the thickets which dot the
ground. Then finally I saw the great whirling ring of them form--under
what common impulse to frenzy I cannot divine. There was no signal,
no preparation, but as if fired in unison they joined hands, and
spreading out to a circumference so wide that I could distinguish
nothing but a ring of light, they whirled faster and faster till the
speed of them sang in my ears like harps, and whirling so, melted
away.

Later on and in wilder surroundings than this I saw, and shall relate
in its place, a dance of Oreads. It differed in detail from this one,
but not, I think, in any essential. This was my first experience of
the kind.

QUIDNUNC

I was so fired by that extraordinary adventure, that I think I could
have overcome my constitutional timidity and made myself acquainted
with the only actor in it who was accessible if I had not become
involved in another matter of the sort. But I don't know that I should
have helped myself thereby. To the night the things of the night
pertain. If I could have had speech with Mrs. Ventris in that season
of her radiancy there would have been no harm; but by day she was
another creature. Thereby contact was impossible because it would have
been horrible. It is true that a certain candour of conduct
distinguished her from the frowsy drabs with whom she must have
jostled in public-house bars or rubbed elbows at lodging-house doors,
a sort of unconsciousness of evil, which I take to have been due to an
entire absence of a moral sense. It is probable that she was not a
miserable sinner because she did not know what was miserable sin. Heat
and cold she knew, hunger and thirst, rage and kindness. She could not
be unwoman