The Holy Six of Wales sat in silence. The day was drawing to a close, and the heat of the first discussion grew cooler with the falling sun. All through the afternoon they had talked of nothing but the disappearance of the rector of Llareggub, and now, as the first lack of light moved in a visible shape and colour through the room, and their tongues were tired, and they heard the voices in their nerves, they waited only for the first darkness to set in. At the first signs of night they would step from the table, adjust their hats and smiles, and walk into the wicked streets. Where the women smiled under the lamps, and the promise of the old sickness stirred in the fingertips of the girls in the dark doorways, the Six would pass dreaming, to the scrape of their boots on the pavement, of the women throughout the town smiling and doctoring love. To Mr. Stul the women drifted in a maze of hair, and touched him in a raw place. The women drifted around Mr. Edger. He caught them close to him, holding their misty limbs to his with no love or fire. The women moved again, with the grace of cats, edging down the darker alleys where Mr. Vyne, envious of their slant-eyed beauty, would scrape and bow. To Mr. Rafe, their beauties, washed in blood, were enemies of the fluttering eyes, and moved, in what image they would, full-breasted, furfooted, to a massacre of the flesh. He saw the red nails, and trembled. There was no purpose in the shaping wombs but the death of the flesh they shaped, and he shrank from the contact of death, and the male nerve was pulled alone. Tugging and tweaking, putting salt on the old love-cuts, Mr. Lucytre conducted an imaginary attack upon the maiden-heads. Now here and now there he ripped the women, and, kissing them, he bit into their lips. Spitefully, Mr. Stipe watched him. Down fell the women on the sharp blade, and his heart smiled within him as they rose to dress their wounds.

The holy life was a constant erection to these six gentlemen. Miss Myfanwy came in with a letter.

Mr. Edger opened the envelope. It contained a square piece of paper that might be a banknote. It was a letter from Mrs. Amabel Owen and was written in a backward hand.

She put malignity in the curves and tails of the characters, a cloven foot, a fork, and a snake’s sting coming out from the words in a separate life as the words lay back giddy from her revolving pen along the lines.