"For every woman there is a lover and when there are not enough lovers to go around two or three of the women sometimes have the same lover or it's the other way about. It all depends, you see, on how much love the man or woman is capable of feeling. That's all that counts in this street.

"And so the men and women live together in their houses and there are no good people, only beautiful ones, and children are born and their fancies are allowed to riot all over the place, and no one takes himself too seriously and thinks the whole outcome of human life depends upon himself, and people go out of these houses to work in the morning and come back at night and where they get all the rich comforts of life they have I can't make out. It's because there is really such a rich abundance of everything in the world somewhere and they have found out about it, I suppose."

On their first evening together he and Natalie had walked beyond the town and had got into a country road. They went along this for a mile and then turned into a little side road. There was a great tree growing beside the road and they went to stand leaning against it, standing side by side in silence.

It was after they had kissed that he told Natalie of his plans. "There are three or four thousand dollars in the bank and the factory is worth thirty or forty thousand more. I don't know how much it is worth, perhaps nothing at all.

"At any rate I'll take a thousand dollars and go away with you. I suppose I'll leave some kind of papers making over the ownership of the place to my wife and daughter. That would, I suppose, be the thing to do.

"Then I'll have to talk to my daughter, make her understand what I am doing and why. Well, I hardly know whether it is possible to make her understand, but I'll have to try. I'll have to try to say something that will stay in her mind so that she in her turn may learn to live and not close and lock the doors of her being as my own doors have been locked. It may take, you see, two or three weeks to think out what I have to say and how to say it. My daughter Jane knows nothing. She is an American middle-class girl and I have helped to make her that. She is a virgin and that, I am afraid,

Natalie, you do not understand. The gods have robbed you of your virginity or perhaps it was your old mother, drunk and calling you names, eh? That might have been a help to you. You wanted so much to have some sweet clean thing happen to you, to something deep down in you, that you went about with the doors of your being opened, eh? They did not have to be torn open. Virginity and respectability had not fastened them with bolts and locks. Your mother must quite have killed all notion of respectability in your family, eh Natalie? It is the most wonderful thing in the world to love you and to know that there is something in you that would make the notion of being cheap and second-class impossible to your lover. O, my Natalie, you are a woman strong to be loved."