ece. Corinth, Athens, the islands, Tempe,
Delphi, Crete--how good to have money and be able to see all these! Italy
and Greece are Europe's pleasure grounds; there the cultivated and the
prosperous traveller may satisfy his soul and forget carking cares and
stabbing ambitions, and drug himself with loveliness.

If Neville abruptly tired of it, and set her face homewards in early
April, it was partly because she felt the need of Rodney, and partly
because she saw, fleetingly but day by day more lucidly, that one could
not take one's stand, for satisfaction of desire, on the money which one
happened to have but which the majority bitterly and emptily lacked. Some
common way there had to be, some freedom all might grasp, a liberty not
for the bourgeois only, but for the proletariat--the poor, the sad, the
gay proletariat, who also grew old and lost their dreams, and had not the
wherewithal to drug their souls, unless indeed they drank much liquor,
and that is but a poor artificial way to peace.

Voyaging homewards through the spring seas, Neville saw life as an
entangling thicket, the Woods of Westermain she had loved in her
childhood, in which the scaly dragon squatted, the craving monster self
that had to be subjugated before one could walk free in the enchanted
woods.

"Him shall change, transforming late,
Wonderously renovate...."

Dimly discerning through the thicket the steep path that climbed to
such liberty as she sought, seeing far off the place towards which her
stumbling feet were set, where life should be lived with alert readiness
and response, oblivious of its personal achievements, its personal claims
and spoils, Neville the spoilt, vain, ambitious, disappointed egoist,
strained her eyes into the distance and half smiled. It might be a dream,
that liberty, but it was a dream worth a fight....

CHAPTER XVI

TIME

1

February at St. Mary's Bay. The small fire flickered and fluttered in
the grate with a sound like the windy beating of wings. The steady rain
sloped against the closed windows of The Gulls, and dropped patteringly
on the asphalt pavements of Marine Crescent outside, and the cold grey
sea tumbled moaning.

Grandmama sat in her arm-chair by the hearth, reading the Autobiography
of a Cabinet Minister's Wife and listening to the fire, the sea and the
rain, and sleeping a little now and again.

Mrs. Hilary sat in another arm-chair, surrounded by bad novels, as if she
had been