Suppose, said the innumerable voices of the road, as she wandered down it relieved and eager in the first moments of freedom, he had not told you? It was sincere and fine of him to tell. Not at all. He wanted to have an easy mind. He has only explained what it was that came between us at the first, and has been waiting ever since to be there again.... “Remember; I _did not know_ you would come.” Why did men not know? That was the strange thing. Why did they make their first impressions of women such as would sully everything that came after? That was the extraordinary thing about the average man and many men who were not average at all. Why? The answer must be there if she could only get through to it. Some immovable answer. The wrong one perhaps, but sufficient to frame an irreversible judgment. There was an irreversible judgment at the heart of it all that would remain, even if further fuller truer reasons were reached later on. Anything that could take the life out of the sunlight was wrong. Every twist and turn of the many little side roads along which she made her way told her that. It was useless to try to run away from it. It remained, the only point of return from the wilderness of anger into which with every fresh attempt at thought, she was immediately flung. The more angry she grew the further she seemed to move from the possibility of finding and somehow expressing, in words that had not sounded in her mind before, the clue to her misery. She reached the park at tea-time. Its vistas were mercifully empty. She breathed more freely within its greenery. Hidden somewhere here, was relief for the increasing numbness of her brain and the drag of her aching heart. The widening sky understood and would presently, when she had reached the statement that lay now, just ahead, offer itself in the old way, for companionship. Wandering along a little path that wound in and out of a thicket of shrubs, she heard a subdued rumble of voices and came in a moment upon two men, bent-headed in conversation side by side on a secluded seat. They looked up at her and upon their shiny German faces, and in the cold rheumy blue eyes beneath their unconscious intelligent German foreheads, was the horrible leer of their talk. Looking up from it, scanning her in the spirit of the images of life they had evoked in their sequestrated confidential interchange, they identified her with their vision. She turned back towards the wide empty avenues. But there was no refuge in them. Their bleak emptiness reflected the thoughtless lives of English men. Behind her the two Germans were immovably there, hemming her in. They were the answer. Sitting hidden there, in the English park, they were the whole unconscious male mind of Europe surprised unmasked. Thought out and systematised by them, openly discussed, without the cloudy reservations of Englishmen, was the whole masculine sense of womanhood. One image;