And from the autumn of nineteen-ten to the spring of nineteen-eleven Desmond’s affair with Headley Richards increased and flowered and ripened to its fulfilment.  And in the early summer she found that things had happened as she had meant that they should happen.

She had always meant it.  She had always said, and she had always thought that women were no good unless they had the courage of their opinions; the only thing to be ashamed of was the cowardice that prevented them from getting what they wanted.

Desmond had no idea that the violence of the Vortex had sucked her in.  Being in the movement of her own free will, she thought that by simply spinning round faster and faster she added her own energy to the whirl.  It was not Dorothy’s vortex, or the vortex of the fighting Suffrage woman.  Desmond didn’t care very much about the Suffrage; or about any kind of freedom but her own kind; or about anybody’s freedom but her own.  Maud Blackadder’s idea of freedom struck Desmond as sheer moral and physical insanity.  Yet each, Desmond and Dorothy and Maud Blackadder and Mrs. Blathwaite and her daughter and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete, had her own particular swirl in the immense Vortex of the young century.  If you had youth and life in you, you were in revolt.

Desmond’s theories were Dorothy’s theories too; only that while Dorothy, as Rosalind had said, thought out her theories in her brain without feeling them, Desmond felt them with her whole being; and with her whole being, secret, subtle and absolutely relentless, she was bent on carrying them out.

And in the summer, in the new season, Headley Richards decided that he had no further use for Desmond.  The new play had run its course at the Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards had been disappointed.  He put down the failure mainly to the queerness of the dresses and the scenery she had designed for him.  Desmond’s new art was too new; people weren’t ready yet for that sort of thing.  At the same time he discovered that he was really very much attached to his own wife Ginny, and when Ginny nobly offered to give him his divorce he had replied nobly that he didn’t want one.  And he left Desmond to face the music.

Desmond’s misery was acute; but it was not so hopeless as it would have been if she could have credited Ginny Richards with any permanent power of attraction for Headley.  She knew he would come back to her.  She knew the power of her own body.  She held him by the tie that was never broken so long as it endured.  He would never marry her; yet he would come back.

But in the interval between these acts there was the music.

And the first sound of the music, the changed intonations of her landlady, frightened Desmond; for though she was older than Nicky she was very young.  And there were Desmond’s people.  You may forget that you have people and behave as if they weren’t there; but, if they are there, sooner or later they will let you know it.  An immense volume of sound and some terrifying orchestral effects were contributed by Desmond’s people.  So that the music was really very bad to bear.