urn round
and round again. He gripped his forehead harder still, to stop it.

His thinking drifted into a kind of moody metaphysics instead of
concentrating itself on the matter in hand. "It takes a poet," he said
to himself, "to create a world, and this world would disgrace a Junior
Journalist." Was it, he wondered, the last effort of a cycle of
transcendental decadence, melancholy, sophisticated? Or was it a cruel
young jest flung off in the barbarous spring-time of creative energy?
Either way it chiefly impressed him with its imbecility. He saw
through it. He saw through most things, Himself included. He knew
perfectly well that he had developed this sudden turn for speculative
thought because he was baulked of an appointment with a little variety
actress. That he should see through the little variety actress was not
to be expected. Poppy was in her nature impenetrable, woman being the
ultimate fact, the inexorable necessity of thought. Supposing the
universe to be nothing more than a dance of fortuitous atoms, then
Poppy, herself a fortuitous atom, led the dance; she was the whirligig
centre towards which all things whirled. No wonder that it made him
giddy to think of her.

Suddenly out of its giddiness his brain conceived and instantly
matured a plan. A practical plan. He would catch that eleven-thirty
express all right. He would go down into Devonshire, and stay in
Devonshire till Saturday. If necessary, he would sit up with those
abominable books all Thursday night and Friday night. And on Saturday
he would return. At the worst he would only have to go down again on
Monday. He would have missed the Junior Journalists' dinner, he would
be lucky if he saw the ghost of an idea on this side Whit Sunday, but
he would have torn the heart out of his holiday.

He rose abruptly. "All right. It's a most awful nuisance, as it
happens, but I'll go."

"I'm glad you're willing to oblige me. You'll not regret it."

Isaac was really meditating something very handsome in the way of a
commission. As he looked benignly into his son's face and saw its deep
misery and repugnance, he answered his own question.

"It _is_ a woman."

BOOK II

LUCIA'S WAY

CHAPTER XIV

He wondered how much longer they were going to keep him waiting. His
head still ached, and every nerve was irritable. He began to suspect
the servant of having failed to report his arrival; he thought of
ringing for him and announcing himself a