ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was well
shaped and competent; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were the
fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet realised that,
far from being unattractive, her body was very attractive to him. She
looked up suddenly. Her eyes were full of eagerness and interest.

"You write novels?" she asked.

For the moment he could not think what he was saying. He was overcome
with the desire to hold her in his arms.

"Oh yes," he said. "That is, I want to write them."

She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.

"Novels," she repeated. "Why do you write novels? You ought to write
music. Music, you see"--she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable
as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her
face--"music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at
once. With writing it seems to me there's so much"--she paused for an
expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth--"scratching on the
matchbox. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this afternoon
I was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!" She gave a shake of
laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.

"_I_ shan't lend you books," he remarked.

"Why is it," Rachel continued, "that I can laugh at Mr. Hirst to you,
but not to his face? At tea I was completely overwhelmed, not by his
ugliness--by his mind." She enclosed a circle in the air with her hands.
She realised with a great sense of comfort who easily she could talk
to Hewet, those thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some
relationships being smoothed away.

"So I observed," said Hewet. "That's a thing that never ceases to amaze
me." He had recovered his composure to such an extent that he could
light and smoke a cigarette, and feeling her ease, became happy and easy
himself.

"The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for
men," he went on. "I believe we must have the sort of power over you
that we're said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as
we are or they'd never obey us. For that very reason, I'm inclined to
doubt that you'll ever do anything even when you have the vote." He
looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and
young. "It'll take at least six generations before you're sufficiently
thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what
a bully the ordinary man is," he continued, "the ordinary ha