"But damn it all," he said to himself, "she makes a good screen for Sylvia . . . who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already . . . as a suffragette!" Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him. . . . Her nimble foot-work, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside this thistle-tops. No; damn it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier does, the eyes of a chaffinch. . . . Infinitely pathetic! Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: "Pink! pink!" The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird: "Damn your eyes! _Have_ them put out, then!" The beastly bird that made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like any other skylark or tom-tit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: "Damn your eyes! _Have_ your chastity impugned them? What do you speak to strange men in public for! You know you can't do it in this country. If it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each other's throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot. . . . well, you could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to every man you met. . . . 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore . . .' To every man you met as long as he wasn't an Englishman of good birth: _that_ would deflower you!" He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. "Well! _be_ deflowered then: _lose_ your infantile reputation. You've spoken to strange pitch: you're defiled . . . with the benefit of Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids of England. . . . They'd all tell you you can't talk to a strange man, in the sunlight, on the links without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or other. . . . Then _be_ a screen for Sylvia: _get_ struck off the visiting books! The deeper you're implicated, the more bloody villain I am! I'd like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it. . . ." Nevertheless, when at the road-side he stood level with Miss Wannop who did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her: "Where's the next stile? I hate walking on roads!" She pointed with her chin along the opposite hedgerow. "Fifty yards!" she said.