p of the downs, waving its white steam, yet all the while
so little. So little, yet its courage carried it from end to end
of the earth, till there was no place where it did not go. Yet
the downs, in magnificent indifference, bearing limbs and body
to the sun, drinking sunshine and sea-wind and sea-wet cloud
into its golden skin, with superb stillness and calm of being,
was not the downs still more wonderful? The blind, pathetic,
energetic courage of the train as it steamed tinily away through
the patterned levels to the sea's dimness, so fast and so
energetic, made her weep. Where was it going? It was going
nowhere, it was just going. So blind, so without goal or aim,
yet so hasty! She sat on an old prehistoric earth-work and
cried, and the tears ran down her face. The train had tunnelled
all the earth, blindly, and uglily.

And she lay face downwards on the downs, that were so strong,
that cared only for their intercourse with the everlasting
skies, and she wished she could become a strong mound smooth
under the sky, bosom and limbs bared to all winds and clouds and
bursts of sunshine.

But she must get up again and look down from her foothold of
sunshine, down and away at the patterned, level earth, with its
villages and its smoke and its energy. So shortsighted the train
seemed, running to the distance, so terrifying in their
littleness the villages, with such pettiness in their
activity.

Skrebensky wandered dazed, not knowing where he was or what
he was doing with her. All her passion seemed to be to wander up
there on the downs, and when she must descend to earth, she was
heavy. Up there she was exhilarated and free.

She would not love him in a house any more. She said she
hated houses, and particularly she hated beds. There was
something distasteful in his coming to her bed.

She would stay the night on the downs, up there, he with her.
It was midsummer, the days were glamorously long. At about
half-past ten, when the bluey-black darkness had at last fallen,
they took rugs and climbed the steep track to the summit of the
downs, he and she.

Up there, the stars were big, the earth below was gone into
darkness. She was free up there with the stars. Far out they saw
tiny yellow lights--but it was very far out, at sea, or on
land. She was free up among the stars.

She took off her clothes, and made him take off all his, and
they ran over the smooth, moonless turf, a long way, more than a
mile from wher