ad laid the loser
more utterly in her lover's arms, more unshakably in his heart. Gerda,
defeated and broken, had won everything. Won even that tribute which had
been Nan's own. "You little sportsman," Barry had called her, with a
break of tenderness in his voice. Even that, even the palm for valour, he
had placed in her hands. The little victor. The greedy little grabber of
other people's things....

Gerda moaned at last.

"Only a little longer," said Nan, and laid her hand lightly and coolly on
the hot wet forehead.

The little winner... damn her....

The edge of a smile, half-ironic, wholly bitter, twisted at Nan's lips.

10

Voices and steps. Barry and a doctor, Barry and a stretcher, Barry and
all kinds of help. Barry's anxious eyes and smile. "Well? How's she
been?"

He was on his knees beside her.

"Here's the doctor, darling.... I'm sorry I've been so long."

CHAPTER X

PRINCIPLES

1

Through the late September and October days Gerda would lie on a wicker
couch in the conservatory at Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken
wrist on a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat pears.
Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of course--but particularly pears.
She also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in pen and ink, and
read Sir Leo Chiozza Money's "Triumph of Nationalisation" and Mrs.
Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and "Lady Adela," and "Coterie," and
listened while Neville read Mr. W.H. Mallock's "Memoirs" and Disraeli's
"Life." Her grandmother (Rodney's mother) sent her "The Diary of Opal
Whiteley," but so terrible did she find it that it caused a relapse, and
Neville had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in vain with a
modern novel, which she usually renounced in perplexity after three
chapters or so. Her taste did not lie in this direction.

"I can't understand what they're all about," she said to Neville.
"Poetry _means_ something. It's about something real, something that
really is so. So are books like this--" she indicated "The Triumph of
Nationalisation." "But most novels are so queer. They're about people,
but not people as they are. They're not _interesting_."

"Not as a rule, certainly. Occasionally one gets an idea out of one
of them, or a laugh, or a thrill. Now and then they express life, or
reality, or beauty, in some terms or other--but not as a rule."

Gerda was different from Kay, who devoured thrillers, shockers, and
ingenious crime and myst