Come back with Mr. Wriford a little. Come back with him a little to scenes where often his mind, not wanders, but hunts--hunts desperately, as hunts for safety, running in panic to and fro, one trapped by the sea on whom the tide advances. There are nights--not occasional nights, but night after night, night after night--when Mr. Wriford cannot sleep and when, in madness against the sleep that will not come, he visions sleep as some actual presence that is in his room mocking him, and springs from his bed to grapple it and seize it and drag it to his pillow. There is a moment then--or longer, he does not know how long--of dreadful loss of identity, in which in the darkness Mr. Wriford flounders and smashes about his room, thinking he wrestles with sleep: and then he realises, and trembling gets back to bed, and cries aloud to know how in God's name to get out of this pass to which he has come, and how in pity's name he has come to it. Come back with him a little. Look how his life as he hunts through it falls into periods. Look how these bring him from Young Wriford that he was--Young Wriford fresh, ardent, keen, happy, to whom across the years he stretches trembling hands--to this Mr. Wriford, one of the lucky ones, that he has become. II Here is Young Wriford of ten years before who has just taken the tremendous plunge into what he calls literature. Here he is, just battling ardently with its fearful hopes and hazards when there comes to him news of Bill and Freda, his brother and sister-in-law, killed by sudden accident in Canada where with their children and Alice, Freda's elder sister, they had made their home. Here he is at the Liverpool docks, meeting Alice and the three little boys to take them to her mother's house in Surbiton. He is the only surviving near relative of Bill's family, and here he is, for old Bill's sake, with every impulse concentrated on playing the game by old Bill's poor little kids and by Alice who, unhappy at home, has always lived with them and been their "deputy-mother," and is now, as she says, their own mother: here is Alice, with Harold aged nine, Dicky aged eight, and Freddie aged seven; Alice, who dreads coming to her home, who tells Young Wriford in the train: "I'm not crying for Freda and Bill. I can't--I simply can't realise that even yet. It's not them, Philip. It's the future I'm thinking of. Phil, what's going to happen to my darlings? They've got nothing--nothing. Father's got four hundred a year--less; and I dread that. I tell you I dread meeting mother and father more than anything. Mother means to be kind--it's kind of her to take the children for Freda's sake; but you know what she is and what father is. And I've nothing--nothing!"