swimming."

Rickie left it to Dido, who stopped immediately.

"I said LEAVE it." His voice rose irritably. "I didn't say 'die.' Of
course she stops if you die. First you sit her as if you're Sandow
exercising, and then you sit like a corpse. Can't you tell her you're
alive? That's all she wants."

In trying to convey the information, Rickie dropped his whip. Stephen
picked it up and rammed it into the belt of his own Norfolk jacket. He
was scarcely a fashionable horseman. He was not even graceful. But he
rode as a living man, though Rickie was too much bored to notice it. Not
a muscle in him was idle, not a muscle working hard. When he returned
from the gallop his limbs were still unsatisfied and his manners still
irritable. He did not know that he was ill: he knew nothing about
himself at all.

"Like a howdah in the Zoo," he grumbled. "Mother Failing will buy
elephants." And he proceeded to criticize his benefactress. Rickie,
keenly alive to bad taste, tried to stop him, and gained instead a
criticism of religion. Stephen overthrew the Mosaic cosmogony. He
pointed out the discrepancies in the Gospels. He levelled his wit
against the most beautiful spire in the world, now rising against the
southern sky. Between whiles he went for a gallop. After a time Rickie
stopped listening, and simply went his way. For Dido was a perfect
mount, and as indifferent to the motions of Aeneas as if she was
strolling in the Elysian fields. He had had a bad night, and the strong
air made him sleepy. The wind blew from the Plain. Cadover and its
valley had disappeared, and though they had not climbed much and could
not see far, there was a sense of infinite space. The fields were
enormous, like fields on the Continent, and the brilliant sun showed up
their colours well. The green of the turnips, the gold of the harvest,
and the brown of the newly turned clods, were each contrasted with
morsels of grey down. But the general effect was pale, or rather
silvery, for Wiltshire is not a county of heavy tints. Beneath these
colours lurked the unconquerable chalk, and wherever the soil was poor
it emerged. The grassy track, so gay with scabious and bedstraw, was
snow-white at the bottom of its ruts. A dazzling amphitheatre gleamed
in the flank of a distant hill, cut for some Olympian audience. And
here and there, whatever the surface crop, the earth broke into little
embankments, little ditches, little mounds: there had been no lack of
drama