y moment. I came up the steps with
inconceivable hostility and disrespect in my bearing, towered
over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of second French
Revolution, and delivered myself with the intensest concentration
of those wicked and incomprehensible words. Just for a second I
threatened annihilation. Happily that was my climax.

And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had
always been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense
of insecurity my episode left in its wake.

The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large
proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith. I thought
they saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied. But indeed
old Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection
of her family's right to dominate a wide country side, than she was
of examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of
the adamantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security.

No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she could
not understand.

None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid
flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below
their feet. The thing leapt out of the black for a moment and
vanished, like a threatening figure by a desolate roadside lit for
a moment by one's belated carriage-lamp and then swallowed up by
the night. They counted it with nightmares, and did their best to
forget what was evidently as insignificant as it was disturbing.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

WAR

Section 1

FROM that moment when I insulted old Mrs. Verrall I became
representative, I was a man who stood for all the disinherited of
the world. I had no hope of pride or pleasure left in me, I was
raging rebellion against God and mankind. There were no more vague
intentions swaying me this way and that; I was perfectly clear now
upon what I meant to do. I would make my protest and die.

I would make my protest and die. I was going to kill Nettie--Nettie
who had smiled and promised and given herself to another, and who
stood now for all the conceivable delightfulnesses, the lost imaginations
of the youthful heart, the unattainable joys in life; and Verrall
who stood for all who profited by the incurable injustice of our
social order. I would kill them both. And that being done I would
blow my brains out and see what vengeance followed my blank refusal
to live.