like snow in the night:  in the morning one would look out and find the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to sap the strength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles.  As to methods, we should be treated as we ourselves treat the inferior races.  There would be no fighting, no killing; we—­our whole social system—­would break as a beam snaps, because we were worm-eaten with altruism and ethics.  We, at our worst, had a certain limit, a certain stage where we exclaimed:  “No, this is playing it too low down,” because we had scruples that acted like handicapping weights.  She uttered, I think, only two sentences of connected words:  “We shall race with you and we shall not be weighted,” and, “We shall merely sink you lower by our weight.”  All the rest went like this: 

“But then,” I would say ... “we shall not be able to trust anyone.  Anyone may be one of you....”  She would answer:  “Anyone.”  She prophesied a reign of terror for us.  As one passed one’s neighbour in the street one would cast sudden, piercing glances at him.

I was silent.  The birds were singing the sun down.  It was very dark among the branches, and from minute to minute the colours of the world deepened and grew sombre.

“But—­” I said.  A feeling of unrest was creeping over me.  “But why do you tell me all this?” I asked.  “Do you think I will enlist with you?”

“You will have to in the end,” she said, “and I do not wish to waste my strength.  If you had to work unwittingly you would resist and resist and resist.  I should have to waste my power on you.  As it is, you will resist only at first, then you will begin to understand.  You will see how we will bring a man down—­a man, you understand, with a great name, standing for probity and honour.  You will see the nets drawing closer and closer, and you will begin to understand.  Then you will cease resisting, that is all.”

I was silent.  A June nightingale began to sing, a trifle hoarsely.  We seemed to be waiting for some signal.  The things of the night came and went, rustled through the grass, rustled through the leafage.  At last I could not even see the white gleam of her face....

I stretched out my hand and it touched hers.  I seized it without an instant of hesitation.  “How could I resist you?” I said, and heard my own whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion.  I raised her hand.  It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; but before it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence had overcome me.  I did not know what it would lead to—­and I remembered that I did not even know who she was.  From the beginning she had struck me as sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her coldness seemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement.  I let her hand fall.

“We must be getting on,” I said.