Chapter 32 - Page 2

it."

In the interval she came into a sitting position on his knees.

He kissed her hand, but her face remained grave, and she looked out
upon the twilight. "I know I'm stupid," she said. "The things I say
... aren't the things I feel."

He waited for her to say more.

"It's no good," she said.

He felt the onus of expression lay on him. He too found it a little
difficult to put into words. "I think I understand," he said, and
wrestled with the impalpable. The pause seemed long and yet not
altogether vacant. She lapsed abruptly into the prosaic. She started
from him.

"If I don't go down, Mother will get supper ..."

At the door she stopped and turned a twilight face to him. For a
moment they scrutinised one another. To her he was no more than a dim
outline. Impulsively he held out his arms....

Then at the sound of a movement downstairs she freed herself and
hurried out. He heard her call "Mother! You're not to lay
supper. You're to rest."

He listened to her footsteps until the kitchen had swallowed them
up. Then he turned his eyes to the Schema again and for a moment it
seemed but a little thing.

He picked it up in both hands and looked at it as if it was the
writing of another man, and indeed it was the writing of another
man. "Pamphlets in the Liberal Interest," he read, and smiled.

Presently a train of thought carried him off. His attitude relaxed a
little, the Schema became for a time a mere symbol, a point of
departure, and he stared out of the window at the darkling night. For
a long time he sat pursuing thoughts that were half emotions, emotions
that took upon themselves the shape and substance of ideas. The
deepening current stirred at last among the roots of speech.

"Yes, it was vanity," he said. "A boy's vanity. For me--anyhow. I'm
too two-sided.... Two-sided?... Commonplace!

"Dreams like mine--abilities like mine. Yes--any man! And yet ...--The
things I meant to do!"

His thoughts went to his Socialism, to his red-hot ambition of world
mending. He marvelled at the vistas he had discovered since those
days.

"Not for us--Not for us.

"We must perish in the wilderness.--Some day. Somewhen. But not for
us....

"Come to think, it is all the Child. The future is the Child. The
Future. What are we--any of us--but servants or traitors to that?...

* * * * *

"Natural Selection--it follows ... this way is happiness ... must
be. There can be no other."

He sighed. "To last a lifetime, that is.

"And yet--it is almost as if Life had played me a