mp-post at the corner and looked back at the
five stark houses; he could not abandon their contemplation; and he
pored upon them as intensely as he might have pored upon a tomb of black
basalt rising out of desert sand. He was immured in the speculation of
their blackness: he pondered hopelessly their meaning and brooded upon
the builders that built them and the sphinx that commanded them to be
built.

In his present mood Michael would have thought Stonehenge rather
prosaic; and he leaned against the wall in the silence, thinking of
brick upon brick, or brick upon brick slabbed with mortar and chipped
and tapped in the past, of brick upon brick as the houses grew higher
and higher ... a railway engine shrieked suddenly: the door of Number
One slammed: and a woman came hurrying down the steps. She looked for a
moment to right and left of her, and then she moved swiftly with a wild,
irregular walk in Michael's direction. He had a sensation that she had
known he was standing here against this wall, that she had watched him
all the while and was hurrying now to ask why he had been standing here
against this wall. He could not turn and walk away: he could not advance
to meet her: so he stood still leaning against the wall. Michael saw her
very plainly as she passed him in the lamplight. Her hat was askew, and
a black ostrich plume hung down over her big chalky face: her lips were
glistening as if they had been smeared with jam. She was wearing a black
satin cloak, and she seemed, as her skirts swept past him, like an
overblown grotesque of tragedy being dragged by a wire from the scene.

Michael shuddered at the monstrousness of her femininity; he seemed to
have been given a glimpse of a mere mass of woman, a soft obscene
primeval thing that demanded blows from a club, nothing else. He
realized how in a moment men could become haters of femininity, could
hate its animalism and wish to stamp upon it. The physical repulsion he
had felt vanished when the sound of her footsteps had died away. In the
reaction Michael pitied her, and he went back quietly to Number One with
the intention of turning Barnes into the street. He was rather startled
as he walked up the steps to see Barnes' face pressed against the
window-pane, for it seemed to him ludicrous that he should wave
reassuringly to a mask like that.

Barnes hurried to open the front door before Michael had taken the key
from his pocket, and was not at all surprised to see h