weaving romances in their efforts to get back, the men betraying their delight in their hidden opportunities of escape by the animation behind the voice and manners they assumed for the fixed calculable periods of forced association; ready to distract attention from themselves and their hidden treasures by public argument, if accident should bring it about, over anything and everything. At least she saw. But what was the _use_ of not being deceived? How in the vast spread of humanity expose the sham? How escape, without surrendering life itself, treacherous countenancing of the fiendish spectacle? What good would death do? What did “Eine fur Viele” do? Brought home the truth to one man, who probably after the first shock, soon came to the conclusion that she had been mad. She talked through lunch to the Brooms with such an intensity of animation that when at last the confrontation was at an end and the afternoon begun in the shelter of the dim little drawing-room, she found Grace and Florrie grouped closely about her, wrapped and eager for more. She turned, at bay, explaining in shaken unmeditated words that the afternoon must be spent by her in thinking out a frightful problem, and relapsed, averted swiftly from their sensitive faces, suddenly pale about eyes that reflected her distress, towards the open door of the little greenhouse leading miserably into the stricken garden. They remained motionless in the chairs they had drawn close to the little settee where she sat enthroned, clearly prepared so to sit in silent sympathy while she gazed at her problem in the garden. She sat tense, but with their eyes upon her she could not summon directly the items of her theme. They appeared transformed in words, a statement of the case that might be made to them, ‘anyone’s’ statement of the case, beginning with “after all”; and leaving everything unstated. Applied to her own experience they seemed to have no meaning at all. Summaries were no good. Actual experience must be brought home to make anything worth communicating. “When he first kissed me” started her mind “those women were all about him. They have come between us forever.” She flushed towards the garden. The mere presence in her mind of such vileness was an outrage on the Broom atmosphere. She could not again face the girls. For some time she sat, driving from point to point in the garden the inexorable fact that she had reached a barrier she could not break down. She could, if she were alone, face the possibility of dashing her life out against it. If she were to turn back from it, she would be rent in twain, and how then, base and deformed could she find spirit to face anyone at all? At last, still with her eyes on the garden, she told them, she must go and think in the open air. They cherished and indulged her in their unaltered way and she escaped, exempted from coming back to tea.