all roads seemed to run to a soft white cliff. Above, the Castle Rock
was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the
mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the
lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that
would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass
that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end
of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's
pictures--the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a
fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking
in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made
loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies. And at
the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong
hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world there
was no question!

But people weren't as nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly
parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could
hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the
Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure
motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face
about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like
that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was
seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.
Ellen knew her very well, for every Saturday morning she used to stride
up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that
shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting
policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could
not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in
geological-looking knobs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat
brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a cock; and
she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her
yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at
the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones
lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen
had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John
Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of anaemia or
spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within
themselves to spe