ose men and maidens as they ran. And they, shop-girls
and shop-boys and young clerks, slipped off their memories of the desk
and counter, and a joy, an instinct, and a sense that had no memory woke
in them, savage, virgin, and shy; the pure and perfect joy of the young
body in its own strength and speed; the instinct of the hunter of the
hills and woodlands; the sense of feet padding on grass and fallen
leaves, of ears pricking alert, of eyes that face the dawn on the high
downs and go glancing through the coverts. And as this radiant and
vehement life rose in them like a tide their gravity and shyness and
severity passed from them; here and there hair was loosened, combs were
shed, and nobody stopped to gather them; for frenzy seized on the young
men, and their arms pressed on the girls' shoulders, urging the pace
faster and faster; and light, swift as their flying feet, shot from
their eyes, and they laughed each to the other as they ran. So divine
was now the madness of their running, so inspired the whirling of the
Wheel, that the thing showed plainly as the undying, immemorial ecstasy;
showed as the secret dance of magic and of mystery, taken over by the
London Polytechnic, and, at the very moment when its corybantic nature
most declared itself, constrained to an order and a beauty tremendous
and austere.

So wise and powerful was the London Polytechnic.

For Ransome, mixed with that joy of the running, there was a joy of his
own, an instinct and a sense, virgin and shy, absolved from memory. He
found it, when Winny Dymond ran before him, in the slender, innocent
movement of her hips under her thin tunic, in the absurd flap-flapping
of the door-knocker plat on her shoulders, in the glances flicked at him
by the tail of her eye as she wheeled from him in the endless pursuit
and capture and approach and flight, as she was parted, was flung from
him and returned to him in the windings of the Maze. He found it to
perfection in the pressure of each other's arms as the Maze wed them and
whirled them running, locked together in the pattern of the wheel. It
was not love so much as some inspired sense of comradeship mingled
inextricably with that other sense of absurdity and tenderness.

Not love, not passion, even when in the excitement of the running she
swerved to the wrong side and he had to turn her with his two hands upon
her waist. For it was the law of their running that, though it was one
with the movement of lif