Some day there might be a world inhabited by people who lived. There would be, then, an end of continual mouthings about death. People would take life up firmly like a filled cup and carry it until the time came to throw it away over the shoulder with a gesture. They would realize that wine was made to drink, food to eat and nourish the body, the ears to hear all manner of sounds, the eyes to see things.

Within the bodies of such people what unknown senses might there not be developed. Well, it might very well be that a young woman, such as John Webster was trying to fancify into existence, that on such evenings such a young woman might be lying quietly in a bed in an upper chamber of one of the houses along the dark street. One went in at the open door of the house and taking up the lamp went to her. One could fancy the lamp itself as a thing of beauty too. There was a small ring-like arrangement through which one slipped the finger. One wore the lamp like a ring on the finger. The little flame of it was like a jewel shining in the darkness.

One went up the stairs and into the room where the woman was lying on the bed. The light, held swinging slightly in the quiet air, shone into the eyes of the woman. There was a long slow time when the two people looked quietly at each other.

There was a question being asked. "Are you for me? Am I for you?" People had developed a new sense, many new senses. People saw with their eyes, smelled with their nostrils, heard with their ears The deeper-lying, buried away senses of the body had been developed too. Now people could accept or dismiss one another with gesture. There was no more slow starvation of men and women. Long lives did not have to be lived during which one knew, anc then but faintly, a few half-golden moments.

*

There was something about all this having fancies closely connected with his marriage and with his life since his marriage. H was trying to make that clear to his daughter, but it was difficult.

There had been that moment once, when he had gone into the upper room of a house and had found a woman lying before him. There had been a question come suddenly and unexpectedly into hi own eyes and it had found a quick eager answer in hers.

And then, the devil, it was hard to get things straight. In some way a lie had been told. By whom? There had been a poison he and the woman had breathed together. Who had blown the cloud of poison vapour into the air of that upper bed-chamber?

The moment had kept coming back and back into the mind of the young man. He walked in streets of strange towns having thoughts of coming into the upper bed-chamber of a new kind of womanhood.