, the demagogue informed her, gives in His march of time
spectacular illustration of temporal vanity. The earthquake ruins us,
the flood engulfs us, fire and water are His ministers to level the pomp
of power. Therefore, said the demagogue, forget the sweet abidingness of
home, the brooding peace of edifices, the symbolic uses of matter to
show us, though we live but in tents of a night, that therein is a sign
of the Eternal City. Down with property. Addington had learned to
distrust one sort of individual, and she instantly believed she could
trust the other individual who was as unlike him as possible. Because
Dives had been numb to human needs, Lazarus was the new-discovered
leader. And the pitiful part of it all was that though Addington used
the alphabet and spoke the language of "social unrest", it did it merely
with the relish of playing with a new thing. It didn't make a jot of
difference in its daily living. It didn't exert itself over its local
government, it didn't see the Weedon Moores were honeycombing the soil
with sedition. It talked, and talked, and knew the earth would last its
time.

When Jeffrey tore up the life of his fellow prisoner he did it as if he
tore his own past with it. He sat down to write his new book which was,
in a way, an autobiography. He had read the enduring ones. He used to
think they were crudely honest, and he meant now to tell the truth as
brutally as the older men: how, in his seething youth, when he scarcely
knew the face of evil in his arrogant confidence that he was strong
enough to ride it bareback without falling off, if it would bring him to
his ends, he leaped into the money game. And at that point, he owned
ingenuously, he would have to be briefly insincere. He could unroll his
own past, but not Esther's. The minute the stage needed her he realised
he could never summon her. He might betray himself, not her. It was she,
the voice incarnate of greed and sensuous delight, that had whipped him
along his breathless course, and now he had to conceal her behind a
wilful lie and say they were his own delights that lured him.

He sat there in his room writing on fiery nights when the moths crowded
outside the screen and small sounds urged the freedom and soft
beguilement of the season, even in the bounds of streets. The colonel,
downstairs, sat in a determined patience over Mary Nellen's linguistic
knots, what time he was awake long enough to tackle them, and wished
Jeff would