suffering into old age, but to help keep the star of her faith in her
charm intact!

Man and woman--they both wanted youth again; she, that she might give it
all to him; he, because it would help him towards something--new! Just
that world of difference!

He got up, and said:

"Come, dear, let's try and sleep."

He had not once said that he could give it up. The words would not pass
his lips, though he knew she must be conscious that he had not said
them, must be longing to hear them. All he had been able to say was:

"So long as you want me, you shall never lose me... and, I will never
keep anything from you again."

Up in their room she lay hour after hour in his arms, quite unresentful,
but without life in her, and with eyes that, when his lips touched them,
were always wet.

What a maze was a man's heart, wherein he must lose himself every
minute! What involved and intricate turnings and turnings on itself;
what fugitive replacement of emotion by emotion! What strife between
pities and passions; what longing for peace! . . .

And in his feverish exhaustion, which was almost sleep, Lennan hardly
knew whether it was the thrum of music or Sylvia's moaning that he
heard; her body or Nell's within his arms....

But life had to be lived, a face preserved against the world,
engagements kept. And the nightmare went on for both of them, under the
calm surface of an ordinary Sunday. They were like people walking at the
edge of a high cliff, not knowing from step to step whether they would
fall; or like swimmers struggling for issue out of a dark whirlpool.

In the afternoon they went together to a concert; it was just something
to do--something that saved them for an hour or two from the possibility
of speaking on the one subject left to them. The ship had gone down,
and they were clutching at anything that for a moment would help to keep
them above water.

In the evening some people came to supper; a writer and two painters,
with their wives. A grim evening--never more so than when the
conversation turned on that perennial theme--the freedom, spiritual,
mental, physical, requisite for those who practise Art. All the stale
arguments were brought forth, and had to be joined in with unmoved
faces. And for all their talk of freedom, Lennan could see the
volte-face his friends would be making, if they only knew. It was not
'the thing' to seduce young girls--as if, forsooth, there were freedom
in doing only what peop