He began to think again, and to think with a new power. His body was cold and aching. His mind seemed to leave it. His mind played about Ann, the figure of Ann, weeping in silence. It played maliciously about her, stripped her, let down her hair, revealed her nakedly as woman, short-legged, wide-hipped, small-breasted, not so unlike a boy save for the excrescences and distortions created by her physical functions. That was too horrible. With an effort of will he brushed it aside, wrenched away from its fascination. Her individuality was restored to her and a little warmth crept into his vision of her. He was not sensible of her charm, and he was free of all lover's memory of her attraction. His mind went probing into hers, saw how it delighted in impressions, but could make no store of them; how her delight had been increased by love and how she had used her love to aggravate her sensibility to the point of intoxication; how the fierce hunger for intoxication had desired to feed on him, and how her love for him had made her desire to bring him to the same condition. He saw her innocence; how free she was of deliberate purpose and set greed; how animal and yet how little sensual; and how she was snared in her own ignorance of love and its ways. Trapped she was and baffled. She could have been so happy with a mate as ignorant as herself, as willing to be snared. They could so easily have perished together, and sunk into resignation, she and such a mate. And inexorable nature had made her fruitful, to bring forth in her rage, when she would be spent with tearing at the meshes that had caught her. She would go on tearing, tearing, and he could spare her nothing. His strength could not sustain her. She desired only his weakness, to have him with her, caught and struggling; to have him by her side, spent and broken, to take comfort in the child. He seemed to himself to be so near this fate, so nearly caught, that he cried out: "I will not! I will not!" For a moment the words startled him and shook him out of his stupor. Then his agony came back with a redoubled fury, and in the desperate hope of fighting it back he let words come tumbling out, hurling them from him: "I will not be used for a creation in which I know no joy. I will not cloak brute creation with a seeming joy distilled by mind and time and custom. I will not be used up and broken and cover indecency with false decency, nor be comforted with the life that has stolen my own. My life shall give life, and for the giving have only the more to give. That which I have done with the spirit not awakened in me is done and no longer a part of me. That which the spirit does in me lives on forever and ever." Kilner found him lying in the darkness, staring with vacant eyes. He was terrified. René looked so deathly. He sat by his side and chafed his hands, and caressed him tenderly, soothed him, spoke to him in little staccato phrases, and went on with them until he seemed to listen: