of minute
ineptitudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and
---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet,
Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the
Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.

Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in
Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than he
believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules
Reveillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all
the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of
qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.

But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old
horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
unanimity. The vortex--_the_ Vortex--was like the little vortex of
school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a
herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the
same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective
and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry
was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the
fugitive, solitary private soul.

And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had
the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing
some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away
from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.

Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a
great longing to break loose and get away.

He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think
they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come
of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't
see what's coming. Yet something must come. _They_ can't be the end."

He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.
It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have
helped to clear it."

He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and
of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.

PART III

VICTORY

XVIII

It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles
because of the fine weather and the d