in my heart I told myself the end had still to come.)

And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me.

"Where are they now?" she asked.

"Who?"

"Nettie and--him."

She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts. "I don't know," I
said shortly.

Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.

"It's better so," she said, as if pleading. "Indeed . . . it is
better so."

There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment
took me back across an epoch, to the protests of the former time,
to those counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It,
that had always stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me.

"That is the thing I doubt," I said, and abruptly I felt I could
talk no more to her of Nettie. I got up and walked away from her,
and came back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch
of daffodils for her in my hand.

But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days
when my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be
alone; I walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new interest
and relief in learning to ride. For the horse was already very
swiftly reaping the benefit to the Change. Hardly anywhere was the
inhumanity of horse traction to be found after the first year of
the new epoch, everywhere lugging and dragging and straining was
done by machines, and the horse had become a beautiful instrument
for the pleasure and carriage of youth. I rode both in the saddle
and, what is finer, naked and barebacked. I found violent exercises
were good for the states of enormous melancholy that came upon me,
and when at last horse riding palled, I went and joined the aviators
who practised soaring upon aeroplanes beyond Horsemarden Hill. . . .
But at least every alternate day I spent with my mother, and
altogether I think I gave her two-thirds of my afternoons.

Section 4

When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an euthanasia
for so many of the older people in the beginning of the new time,
took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter
her--after our new custom. She chose to come. She was already
known to us a little from chance meetings and chance services she
had done my mother in the garden; she sought to give her help. She
seemed then just one of those plainly good girls the world at its
worst has never failed to produce, who were indeed in the dark old
times the hidden antisepti