Birds were flying in the air over a river, and young Webster, with his eyes closed, crouched before the woman, was himself the birds in the air, the air itself, and the fishes in the river below. It seemed to him now that if he were to open his eyes and look back, down into the valley, he could see, even from that great distance, the movements of the fins of fishes in the waters of the river far below.

Well he had better not open his eyes now. Once he had looked into a woman's eyes and she had come to him like a swimmer coming up out of the sea, but then something had happened to spoil everything. He crept towards her. Now she had begun to protest. "Don't," she said, "I'm afraid."

It would not do to stop now. There was a time came when one must not stop. He threw his arms out, took her protesting and crying into his arms.

VIII

"Why must one commit rape, rape of the conscious, rape of the unconscious'?"

John Webster sprang up from beside his daughter and then whirled quickly about. A word had come up out of the body of his wife sitting unobserved on the floor behind him. "Don't," she said and then, after opening and closing her mouth twice, ineffectually, repeated the word. "Don't, don't," she said again. The words seemed to be forcing themselves through her lips. Her body lumped down there on the floor had become just a strangely misshapen bundle of flesh and bones.

She was pale, of a pasty paleness.

John Webster had jumped off the bed as a dog, lying asleep in the dust of a roadway, might have leaped out of the path of a rapidly moving vehicle.

The devil! His mind was jerked back into the present swiftly, violently. A moment before he had been with a young woman on a hillside above a wide sun-washed valley and had been making love to her. The love-making had not been a success. It had turned out badly. There had been a tall slender girl who had submitted her body to a man, but who had been all the time terribly frightened and beset by a sense of guilt and shame. After the love-making she had cried, not with an excess of tenderness, but because she had felt unclean. They had walked down the hillside later and she had tried to tell him how she felt. Then he also had begun to feel mean and unclean. Tears had come into his own eyes. He had thought she must be right. What she said almost everyone said. After all man was not an animal. Man was a conscious thing trying to struggle upwards out of animalism. He had tried to think everything out that same night as he, for the first time, lay in bed beside his wife, and he had come to certain conclusions. She was no doubt right in her belief that there were certain impulses in men that had better be subjected to the power of the will. If one just let oneself go one became no better than a beast.