s glittering, her face
flushed with tumultuous anger. This was her defiance to life. She had
been made into a rebel through long years in which she had unconsciously
measured herself with others. Because she was a human being, Jenny
thought she had a right to govern her own actions. With a whole
priesthood against her, Jenny was a rebel against the world as it
appeared to her--a crushing, numerically overwhelming pressure that
would rob her of her one spiritual reality--the sense of personal
freedom.

"Oh, I can't stand it!" she said bitterly. "I shall go mad! And Em
taking it all in, and ready to have Alf's foot on her neck for life. And
Alf ready to have Em chained to his foot for life. The fools! Why, I
wouldn't ... not even to Keith.... No, I wouldn't.... Fancy being boxed
up and pretending I liked it--just because other people say they like
it. Do as you're told. Do like other people. All be the same--a sticky
mass of silly fools doing as they're told! All for a bit of bread,
because somebody's bagged the flour for ever! And what's the good of it?
If it was any good--but it's no good at all! And they go on doing it
because they're cowards! Cowards, that's what they all are. Well, I'm
not like that!"

Exhausted, Jenny sat down again; but she could not keep still. Her feet
would not remain quietly in the place she, as the governing
intelligence, commanded. They too were rebels, nervous rebels,
controlled by forces still stronger than the governing intelligence. She
felt trapped, impotent, as though her hands were tied; as though only
her whirling thoughts were unfettered. Again she took up the hat, but
her hands so trembled that she could not hold the needle steady. It made
fierce jabs into the hat. Stormily unhappy, she once more threw the work
down. Her lips trembled. She burst into bitter tears, sobbing as though
her heart were breaking. Her whole body was shaken with the deep and
passionate sobs that echoed her despair.

iv

Presently, when she grew calmer, Jenny wiped her eyes, her face quite
pale and her hands still convulsively trembling. She was worn out by
the stress of the evening, by the vehemence of her rebellious feelings.
When she again spoke to herself it was in a shamed, giggling way that
nobody but Emmy had heard from her since the days of childhood. She gave
a long sigh, looking through the blur at that clear glow from beneath
the iron door of the kitchen grate. Miserably she refused to think