s and wash their faces for them. Any paid Irish nurse could
do for them what their mother bent the priceless treasure of her
temperament to accomplish. The Irish nurse would do it better, for she
would not be aware of anything else better, which she might do, and
their mother knew well enough what she sacrificed . . . or if she did not
know it yet, she would, soon. She had betrayed that to him, the very
first time he had seen her, that astonishing first day, when, breathing
out her vivid charm like an aureole of gold mist, she had sat there
before him, quite simply the woman most to his taste he had even seen
. . . _here_! That day when she had spoken about the queerness of her
feeling "lost" when little Mark went off to school, because for the
first time in years she had had an hour or so free from those ruthless
little leeches who spent their lives in draining her vitality. He had
known, if she had not, the significance of that feeling of hers, the
first time she had had a moment to raise her eyes from her trivial task
and see that she had been tricked into a prison. That very day he had
wanted to cry out to her, as impersonally as one feels towards a
beautiful bird caught in a net, "Now, _now_, burst through, and spread
your wings where you belong."

It was like wiping up the floor with cloth of gold. In order that those
three perfectly commonplace, valueless human lives might be added to the
world's wretched population, a nature as rare as a jewel was being
slowly ground away. What were the treasures to whom she was being
sacrificed? Paul, the greasy, well-intentioned, priggish burgher he
would make; Elly, almost half-witted, a child who stared at you like an
imbecile when asked a question, and who evidently scarcely knew that her
mother existed, save as cook and care-taker. And Mark, the passionate,
gross, greedy baby. There were the three walls of the prison where she
was shut away from any life worthy of her.

And the fourth wall . . .

* * * * *

The blackness dropped deeper about him, and within him. There they were
dancing, those idiots, dancing on a volcano if ever human beings did, in
the little sultry respite from the tornado which was called the
world-peace. Well, that was less idiotic than working, at least. How
soon before it would break again, the final destructive hurricane, born
of nothing but the malignant folly of human hearts, and sweep away all
that they now agon