and action she had accepted something she neither liked, nor approved nor understood; refusal would have left its secret unplumbed, standing aside in her life, tormenting it. The sense of the secret intoxicated her ... perhaps I am selling my soul to the devil. But she was glad that Mr. Wilson had witnessed her launching. "You are magnificent" gasped the young man glaring at the wall. "I mean you are simply magnificent." He flashed unconscious eyes at her--_he_ had no consciousness of the cold tide with its curious touch of evil; it was hand in hand with him and his simplicity that she had stepped down into the water--and hurried on. "An angel of dreams. Dreams ... you know--I say," he spluttered incoherently, "I _must_ tell you." His working preoccupied face turned to face hers with a jerk that brought part of the heavy sheaf of hair across one of his eyes. "I've been doing the best work this week I ever did in my life!" Red flooded the whole of his face and the far-away glare of his one visible eye became a blaze of light, near, and smiling a guilty delighted smile. He was demanding _her_ approval, _her_ sympathy, just on the strength of her being there. It was the moment of consenting to Alma that had brought this. However it had come she would have been unable to withstand it. He wanted approval and sympathy; someone here had some time or other shut him up; perhaps he was considered second-rate, perhaps he was second-rate; but he was innocent as no one else in the room was innocent. "_Oh_, I _am_ glad" she replied swiftly. Putting his cigarette on the edge of the piano he seized one of her hands and crushed it between his own. His face perspired and there were tears in his eye. "_Do_ tell me about it" she said with bold uneasy eagerness hoping he would drop her hand when he spoke. "It's a play" he shouted in a low whisper, a spray of saliva springing through his lips "a play--it's the finest stuff I ever rout." Were all these people either cockney or with that very bland anglican cultured way of speaking--like the husband and the man with the Tudor mantelpiece? 7 "I can of course admit that the growth of corn was, at first, accidental and unconscious, and that even after the succession of processes began to be grasped and the soil methodically cultivated the success of the crop was supposed to depend upon the propitiation of a _god_. I can see that the discovery of the possibility of growing _food_ would enormously alter the savage's conception of God, by introducing a new set of attributes into his _consciousness_ of him; but in defining the God of the Christians as a _corn_ deity you and Allen are putting the cart before the horse."