ipping from the trees, falling finally like the strokes of
time. Her eyes dwelt for a moment on the colour prints where the nude
beauties languished. She felt desperately tired, though she had not left
the house for thirty-six hours; her weariness was as much a consequence
as a cause of her consciousness of defeat. October was wearing; and soon
the cruel winter would come and fix its fangs into the sole remaining
joy of her life, the spectacle of life itself. She was desperately
tired, full of hatred and disgust. If the face of a man rose before her
she thrust it back savagely into limbo; her legs hurt. The time had come
when she must realise her failure. She was not, as once in the P. R. R.,
in the last stage of exhaustion, hunted, tortured; she was rather the
wounded bird crawling away to die in a thicket than the brute at bay.

As she lay, she realised that her failure had two aspects. It was
together a monetary and a physical failure. The last three months had in
themselves been easy. Her working hours did not begin before seven
o'clock in the evening; and it was open to her, being young and
beautiful, to put them off for two or three hours more; she was always
free by twelve o'clock in the morning at the very latest, and then the
day was hers to rest, to read and think. But she was still too much of
a novice to escape the excitement inherent in the chase, the strain of
making conversation, of facing the inane; nor was she able without a
mental effort to bring herself to the response of the simulator. As she
sat in the Vesuvius or stared into the showcase of a Regent Street
jeweller, a faint smile upon her face, her brain was awake, her
faculties at high pressure. Her eyes roved right and left and every
nerve seemed to dance with expectation or disappointment. When she got
up now, she found her body heavy, her legs sore and all her being dull
like a worn stone. A little more, she felt, and the degradation of her
body would spread to her sweet lucidity of mind; she would no longer see
ultimate ends but would be engulfed in the present, become a bird of
prey seeking hungrily pleasure or excitement.

Besides, and this seemed more serious still, she was not doing well. It
seemed more serious because this could not be fought as could be
intellectual brutalisation. An examination of her pass books showed that
she was a little better off than at the time of Cairns's death. She was
worth, all debts paid, about three hundred