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ose men and maidens as they ran. And they, shop-girls and shop-boys and young clerks, slipped off their memories of the desk and counter, and a joy, an instinct, and a sense that had no memory woke in them, savage, virgin, and shy; the pure and perfect joy of the young body in its own strength and speed; the instinct of the hunter of the hills and woodlands; the sense of feet padding on grass and fallen leaves, of ears pricking alert, of eyes that face the dawn on the high downs and go glancing through the coverts. And as this radiant and vehement life rose in them like a tide their gravity and shyness and severity passed from them; here and there hair was loosened, combs were shed, and nobody stopped to gather them; for frenzy seized on the young men, and their arms pressed on the girls' shoulders, urging the pace faster and faster; and light, swift as their flying feet, shot from their eyes, and they laughed each to the other as they ran. So divine was now the madness of their running, so inspired the whirling of the Wheel, that the thing showed plainly as the undying, immemorial ecstasy; showed as the secret dance of magic and of mystery, taken over by the London Polytechnic, and, at the very moment when its corybantic nature most declared itself, constrained to an order and a beauty tremendous and austere. So wise and powerful was the London Polytechnic. For Ransome, mixed with that joy of the running, there was a joy of his own, an instinct and a sense, virgin and shy, absolved from memory. He found it, when Winny Dymond ran before him, in the slender, innocent movement of her hips under her thin tunic, in the absurd flap-flapping of the door-knocker plat on her shoulders, in the glances flicked at him by the tail of her eye as she wheeled from him in the endless pursuit and capture and approach and flight, as she was parted, was flung from him and returned to him in the windings of the Maze. He found it to perfection in the pressure of each other's arms as the Maze wed them and whirled them running, locked together in the pattern of the wheel. It was not love so much as some inspired sense of comradeship mingled inextricably with that other sense of absurdity and tenderness. Not love, not passion, even when in the excitement of the running she swerved to the wrong side and he had to turn her with his two hands upon her waist. For it was the law of their running that, though it was one with the movement of lif
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