ame
homogeneous desire. And all their talk and all their behaviour
was sham, they were dressed-up creatures. She was reminded of
the Invisible Man, who was a piece of darkness made visible only
by his clothes.

During the next weeks, all the time she went about in the
same dark richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes
of a wild animal, a curious half-smile which seemed to be gibing
at the civic pretence of all the human life about her.

"What are you, you pale citizens?" her face seemed to say,
gleaming. "You subdued beast in sheep's clothing, you primeval
darkness falsified to a social mechanism."

She went about in the sensual sub-consciousness all the time,
mocking at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest.

"They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing," she
said to herself, looking in mocking contempt at the stiffened,
neutralized men. "They think it better to be clerks or
professors than to be the dark, fertile beings that exist in the
potential darkness. What do you think you are?" her soul asked
of the professor as she sat opposite him in class. "What do you
think you are, as you sit there in your gown and your
spectacles? You are a lurking, blood-sniffing creature with eyes
peering out of the jungle darkness, snuffing for your desires.
That is what you are, though nobody would believe it, and
you would be the very last to allow it."

Her soul mocked at all this pretence. Herself, she kept on
pretending. She dressed herself and made herself fine, she
attended her lectures and scribbled her notes. But all in a mood
of superficial, mocking facility. She understood well enough
their two-and-two-make-four tricks. She was as clever as they
were. But care!--did she care about their monkey tricks of
knowledge or learning or civic deportment? She did not care in
the least.

There was Skrebensky, there was her dark, vital self. Outside
the college, the outer darkness, Skrebensky was waiting. On the
edge of the night, he was attentive. Did he care?

She was free as a leopard that sends up its raucous cry in
the night. She had the potent, dark stream of her own blood, she
had the glimmering core of fecundity, she had her mate, her
complement, her sharer in fruition. So, she had all,
everything.

Skrebensky was staying in Nottingham all the time. He too was
free. He knew no one in this town, he had no civic self to
maintain. He was free. Their trams and markets and theatres and
pub