ith the desire for the girl.

Then gradually the glow began to fade, and the cold material
of his customary life to show through. He resented it. Was he
cheated in his illusion? He balked the mean enclosure of
reality, stood stubbornly like a bull at a gate, refusing to
re-enter the well-known round of his own life.

He drank more than usual to keep up the glow. But it faded
more and more for all that. He set his teeth at the commonplace,
to which he would not submit. It resolved itself starkly before
him, for all that.

He wanted to marry, to get settled somehow, to get out of the
quandary he found himself in. But how? He felt unable to move
his limbs. He had seen a little creature caught in bird-lime,
and the sight was a nightmare to him. He began to feel mad with
the rage of impotency.

He wanted something to get hold of, to pull himself out. But
there was nothing. Steadfastly he looked at the young women, to
find a one he could marry. But not one of them did he want. And
he knew that the idea of a life among such people as the
foreigner was ridiculous.

Yet he dreamed of it, and stuck to his dreams, and would not
have the reality of Cossethay and Ilkeston. There he sat
stubbornly in his corner at the "Red Lion", smoking and musing
and occasionally lifting his beer-pot, and saying nothing, for
all the world like a gorping farm-labourer, as he said
himself.

Then a fever of restless anger came upon him. He wanted to go
away--right away. He dreamed of foreign parts. But somehow
he had no contact with them. And it was a very strong root which
held him to the Marsh, to his own house and land.

Then Effie got married, and he was left in the house with
only Tilly, the cross-eyed woman-servant who had been with them
for fifteen years. He felt things coming to a close. All the
time, he had held himself stubbornly resistant to the action of
the commonplace unreality which wanted to absorb him. But now he
had to do something.

He was by nature temperate. Being sensitive and emotional,
his nausea prevented him from drinking too much.

But, in futile anger, with the greatest of determination and
apparent good humour, he began to drink in order to get drunk.
"Damn it," he said to himself, "you must have it one road or
another--you can't hitch your horse to the shadow of a
gate-post--if you've got legs you've got to rise off your
backside some time or other."

So he rose and went down to Ilkeston, rather awkwardly