For they believed—these Barrs of America did—that force is the only effective form of moral propaganda in the world. They believed this with all the fanaticism of intolerance and stupidity. Force and repression were the only two things they did sincerely believe in, though they would have died sooner than acknowledge this. Not theirs the aim of replacing lower forms of enjoyment by higher ones, baser religions by nobler ones. Theirs was the modest if unavowed mission of improving on the example of Jesus Christ. In a moment of divine (and regrettable) weakness, Christ had suffered torture for his enemies. The Barrs undertook the pious duty of counteracting this weakness by making _their_ enemies suffer torture for Christ. In this atmosphere of moral taboos and sex repression, Janet had grown up like an alien spirit in a foreign land. From the very first stirrings of intelligence, some independent strain in her had set her in antagonism to her environment. She had not been fully conscious of this antagonism, much less of the issues involved, and she had seldom given battle directly to her mother’s despotism. But even when she had bowed her head to the force of argument or to the argument of force, her heart had remained untouched. She had knuckled under time and again, but her service had been lip service and her homage the homage only of the knee. It was a situation she had but dimly realized when she first met Robert Lloyd. His sensible views and galvanic realism had startled her out of her half-hearted acceptance of a decrepit tradition and carried her at one bound from the shadowy Brooklyn existence of the age of Praise-God-Barebones to the vivid actuality of the age of the airplane. The first novelty of contemporary life had been overwhelming. She felt as though she had lost consciousness in the seventeenth century and, like the fabled princess, had lain in a twilight sleep until Robert Lloyd had awakened her to the throb and stir of the twentieth century. Her friendship with Robert had begun shortly after the end of the war, the great World War from which the Barrs had learnt as much as a blind man learns from a mirror. Chance had next thrown her into the arms of Emily’s classmate, Cornelia Covert. Cornelia had taken her in hand and brought her into the free and easy atmosphere of the Lorillard model tenements in Kips Bay. Her furtive visits to Cornelia’s flat had led her by gradual stages into the stress and clash of the metropolis until, what with one new experience and another, she began to distinguish the trumpet-tongued voices of her own generation and to feel in her soul the resurgent willfulness of the modern age. *IV*