with Mr. Cradock. She had come to rely on it on a Wednesday.

5

Nan sat up late, correcting proofs, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed.
Galleys lay all round her on the floor by the stove. She let them slip
from her knee and lie there. She hated them....

She pressed her hands over her eyes, shutting them out, shutting out
life. She was going off with Stephen Lumley. She had told him so this
morning. Both their lives were broken; hers by Barry, whom she loved, his
by his wife, whom he disliked. He loved her; he wanted her. She could
with him find relief, find life a tolerable thing. They could have a good
time together. They were good companions; their need, though dissimilar,
was mutual. They saw the same beauty, spoke the same tongue, laughed at
the same things. In the very thought of Stephen, with his cynical humour,
his clear, keen mind, his lazy power of brain, Nan had found relief all
that day, reacting desperately from a mind fuddled with sentiment and
emotion as with drink, a soft, ignorant brain, which knew and cared about
nothing except people, a hysterical passion of anger and malice. They had
pushed her sharply and abruptly over the edge of decision, that mind and
brain and passion. Stephen, against whom their fierce anger was
concentrated, was so different....

To get away, to get right away from everything and everyone, with
Stephen. Not to have to go back to London alone, to see what she could
not, surely, bear to see--Barry and Gerda, Gerda and Barry, always,
everywhere, radiant and in love. And Neville, Gerda's mother, who saw so
much. And Rosalind, who saw everything, everything, and said so. And Mrs.
Hilary....

To saunter round the queer, lovely corners of the earth with Stephen,
light oneself by Stephen's clear, flashing mind, look after Stephen's
weak, neglected body as he never could himself ... that was the only
anodyne. Life would then some time become an adventure again, a gay
stroll through the fair, instead of a desperate sickness and nightmare.

Barry, oh Barry.... Nan, who had thought she was getting better, found
that she was not. Tears stormed and shook her at last. She crumpled up on
the floor among the galley-slips, her head upon the chair.

Those damned proofs--who wanted them? What were books? What was anything?

6

Mrs. Hilary came in, in her dressing-gown, red-eyed. She had heard
strangled sounds, and knew that her child was crying.

"My darling!"

Her arms were ro