ne ready to assist at hand because Anthony (by that time) seemed to be
afraid to come near them; the unforgiving Franklin always looked
wrathfully the other way; the boatswain, if up there, acted likewise but
sheepishly; and any hands that happened to be on the poop (a feeling
spreads mysteriously all over a ship) shunned him as though he had been
the devil.

We know how he arrived on board. For my part I know so little of prisons
that I haven't the faintest notion how one leaves them. It seems as
abominable an operation as the other, the shutting up with its mental
suggestions of bang, snap, crash and the empty silence outside--where an
instant before you were--you _were_--and now no longer are. Perfectly
devilish. And the release! I don't know which is worse. How do they do
it? Pull the string, door flies open, man flies through: Out you go!
_Adios_! And in the space where a second before you were not, in the
silent space there is a figure going away, limping. Why limping? I
don't know. That's how I see it. One has a notion of a maiming,
crippling process; of the individual coming back damaged in some subtle
way. I admit it is a fantastic hallucination, but I can't help it. Of
course I know that the proceedings of the best machine-made humanity are
employed with judicious care and so on. I am absurd, no doubt, but still
. . . Oh yes it's idiotic. When I pass one of these places . . . did you
notice that there is something infernal about the aspect of every
individual stone or brick of them, something malicious as if matter were
enjoying its revenge of the contemptuous spirit of man. Did you notice?
You didn't? Eh? Well I am perhaps a little mad on that point. When I
pass one of these places I must avert my eyes. I couldn't have gone to
meet de Barral. I should have shrunk from the ordeal. You'll notice
that it looks as if Anthony (a brave man indubitably) had shirked it too.
Little Fyne's flight of fancy picturing three people in the fatal four
wheeler--you remember?--went wide of the truth. There were only two
people in the four wheeler. Flora did not shrink. Women can stand
anything. The dear creatures have no imagination when it comes to solid
facts of life. In sentimental regions--I won't say. It's another thing
altogether. There they shrink from or rush to embrace ghosts of their
own creation just the same as any fool-man would.

No. I suppose the girl Flora went on that errand reas