The second whip stroke--_The Lance of the Rivernais_. She had failed, and the failure wasn’t the book, but herself, the thing in his arms. She didn’t stir, but there was coldness of calculation to her thinking now--that he meant ease and rest and expediency, not the ripping, rioting, invincible man force that was to come one day and carry her off her feet. This was the third whip stroke: that he meant propinquity--the nearest, the easiest way. She started up and pushed him from her. “I’m not washed,” she said. “I don’t mean from the mills. I’m not washed, or I couldn’t have--couldn’t have----! I’m just like the rest--dying for a shoulder to cry on. You’re all right, Dicky, so right and fine that I’m ashamed. I’ll always care for you. I’ll always be warm at the thought of you. I’ll always remember how I went to you--how dear you are--but you can’t give me freedom. You can’t give me peace. My soul would rot in ease and peace and plenty. I’ve got to earn my own.” She looked up into his face and her own took a fright from it. “I know I’ll suffer hells for hurting you--but I can’t help it. I had to know. If I have to spend a life in misery--I had to know that there isn’t anything you can give that will satisfy----” His mouth was partly open, his head twisted peculiarly, and lowered, as if his shoulder and neck were deformed. He was shockingly white under the lamp. “Oh, I’m such a beast and I’m so sorry. I really wanted terribly to stay.... But, Dicky Cobden--it wasn’t for you. It wasn’t for you that I wanted to stay--it was for what you have--more.” IX “YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS” DICKY kept his quarters in Harrow Street, but for days at a time did not appear. Pidge Musser at first fancied this was easier. There was a faint cackle of derision from somewhere in her depths, as this idea of it being easier repeated itself in her mind; in fact, there were many conflicting mysteries in Pidge’s deep places. “I laid my head on his shoulder,” she once said to herself, “but thought better of it. Now we are to be strangers.” At unexpected moments when she was busy at the pasting bench; or nights and mornings, passing in and out of sleep, the faint note of mockery would sound. When she passed Dicky in the halls, or met him at one of Miss Claes’ little tea parties, and he would bow distantly or indulge in formal commonplaces, the mockery would stir itself in Pidge’s profundities, indicating that something somewhere was decidedly idiotic. He looked positively diminished as he kept up his formalities, and she liked and respected him too much to feel pleasant about this. She heard that he was interested in Africa. It was to be observed that he sought Nagar; in fact, several times she heard these two together through the partition.