rightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt
fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is
endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not
be bitten by a frothing mouth. But it was not late, and it was as likely
as not that this was Cousin Tom Stallybrass come to say how the Frisian
calf had sold at Prittlebay market, so she opened it at once.

Peacey stood there. He stood quite still, his face held obliquely, his
body stiff and jointless in his clothes, like a huge, fat doll. There
was an appearance of ceremony about him. His skin shone with the white
lacquer of a recent washing with coarse soap, he was dressed very neatly
in his Sunday broadcloth, and he wore a black-and-white check tie which
she had never seen him wear before, and his fingers looked like
varnished bulging pods in tight black kid gloves.

He did not speak. He did not answer her reluctant invitation that he
should enter. She would have thought him drunk had not the smell that
clung about him been so definitely that of soap. From the garden behind
him, which was quilted by a thick night fog, noises as of roosting birds
disturbed. His head turned on the thick hill of his neck, his lids,
with their fringe of long but sparse black lashes, blinked once or
twice. When the sound had passed, his face again grew blank and moonish
and he stepped within. He laid his bowler hat on the table and began to
strip off his gloves. His fleshy fingers, pink with constriction,
terrified her, and she clapped her hands at him and cried out: "Why have
you come?"

But he answered nothing. Speech is human, and words might have fomented
some human relationship between them, and he desired that they should
know each other only as animals and enemies. He continued to take off
his gloves, while round him fragments of fog that had come in with him
hung in the warm air like his familiar spirits, and then bent over the
lamp. She watched his face grow yellow in the diminishing glare, and
moaned, knowing herself weak with motherhood. Then in the blackness his
weight threshed down on her. Even his form was a deceit, for his vast
bulk was not obesity but iron-hard strength. All consciousness soon left
her, except only pain, and she wandered in the dark caverns of her mind.
Her capacity for sexual love lay dead in her. She saw it as a lovely
naked boy lying with blue lips and purple blood pouring from his side,
wh