lic meetings were a shaken kaleidoscope to him, he watched as
a lion or a tiger may lie with narrowed eyes watching the people
pass before its cage, the kaleidoscopic unreality of people, or
a leopard lie blinking, watching the incomprehensible feats of
the keepers. He despised it all--it was all non-existent.
Their good professors, their good clergymen, their good
political speakers, their good, earnest women--all the time
he felt his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So
many performing puppets, all wood and rag for the
performance!

He watched the citizen, a pillar of society, a model, saw the
stiff goat's legs, which have become almost stiffened to wood in
the desire to make them puppet in their action, he saw the
trousers formed to the puppet-action: man's legs, but man's legs
become rigid and deformed, ugly, mechanical.

He was curiously happy, being alone, now. The glimmering grin
was on his face. He had no longer any necessity to take part in
the performing tricks of the rest. He had discovered the clue to
himself, he had escaped from the show, like a wild beast escaped
straight back into its jungle. Having a room in a quiet hotel,
he hired a horse and rode out into the country, staying
sometimes for the night in some village, and returning the next
day.

He felt rich and abundant in himself. Everything he did was a
voluptuous pleasure to him--either to ride on horseback, or
to walk, or to lie in the sun, or to drink in a public-house. He
had no use for people, nor for words. He had an amused pleasure
in everything, a great sense of voluptuous richness in himself,
and of the fecundity of the universal night he inhabited. The
puppet shapes of people, their wood-mechanical voices, he was
remote from them.

For there were always his meetings with Ursula. Very often,
she did not go to college in the afternoon, but walked with him
instead. Or he took a motor-car or a dog-cart and they drove
into the country, leaving the car and going away by themselves
into the woods. He had not taken her yet. With subtle,
instinctive economy, they went to the end of each kiss, each
embrace, each pleasure in intimate contact, knowing
subconsciously that the last was coming. It was to be their
final entry into the source of creation.

She took him home, and he stayed a week-end at Beldover with
her family. She loved having him in the house. Strange how he
seemed to come into the atmosphere of her family, with