ce and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It
was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its
long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven
with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body
than to her spirit and her mind.

* * * * *

In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early summer,
when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent him motoring
about the country on their business, he took Desmond with him and
Desmond's painting box and easel. And they rested on the grass borders
of the high roads and on the edges of the woods and moors, and Desmond
painted her extraordinary pictures while Nicky lay on his back beside
her with his face turned up to the sky and dreamed of flying machines.

For he had done with his Moving Fortress. It only waited for Desmond to
finish the last drawing.

When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank Drayton
before he sent them to the War Office.

He lived for that moment of completion.

* * * * *

And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of nineteen-eleven
Desmond's affair with Headley Richards increased and flowered and
ripened to its fulfilment. And in the early summer she found that things
had happened as she had meant that they should happen.

She had always meant it. She had always said, and she had always thought
that women were no good unless they had the courage of their opinions;
the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice that prevented them
from getting what they wanted.

Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked her in.
Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought that by simply
spinning round faster and faster she added her own energy to the whirl.
It was not Dorothy's vortex, or the vortex of the fighting Suffrage
woman. Desmond didn't care very much about the Suffrage; or about any
kind of freedom but her own kind; or about anybody's freedom but her
own. Maud Blackadder's idea of freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and
physical insanity. Yet each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and
Mrs. Blathwaite and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own
particular swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century. If you had
youth and life in you, you were in revolt.

Desmond's theories were Dorothy's theories too; only that