He leaned against the straight, sternly unyielding bole of the tree, folding his arms and staring at the house.  What a beastly joke the whole business of living!

A thousand ugly recollections poured their venom upon him from his past life.  Life, this little moment of blind, sensual groping and grabbing for something worth while that did not exist, save in the stultification of the intelligence.  All that you reached for, so frantically, it was only another handful of mud, when you held it.

Past the yellow squares of the windows, he saw the shapes of the dancers, insect-tiny, footing it to and fro.  And in one of those silhouettes he recognized Marise Crittenden.

He turned away from the sight and struck his fist against the rough bark of the tree.  What an insane waste and confusion ruled everywhere in human life!  A woman like that to be squandered . . . an intelligence fine and supple, a talent penetrating and rare like hers for music, a strange personal beauty like that of no other woman, a depth one felt like mid-ocean, a capacity for fun like a child’s and a vitality of personality, a power for passion that pulsed from her so that to touch her hand casually set one thrilling . . . !  And good God!  What was destiny doing with her?  Spending that gold like water on three brats incapable of distinguishing between her and any good-natured woman who would put on their shoes and wash their faces for them.  Any paid Irish nurse could do for them what their mother bent the priceless treasure of her temperament to accomplish.  The Irish nurse would do it better, for she would not be aware of anything else better, which she might do, and their mother knew well enough what she sacrificed . . . or if she did not know it yet, she would, soon.  She had betrayed that to him, the very first time he had seen her, that astonishing first day, when, breathing out her vivid charm like an aureole of gold mist, she had sat there before him, quite simply the woman most to his taste he had even seen . . . here!  That day when she had spoken about the queerness of her feeling “lost” when little Mark went off to school, because for the first time in years she had had an hour or so free from those ruthless little leeches who spent their lives in draining her vitality.  He had known, if she had not, the significance of that feeling of hers, the first time she had had a moment to raise her eyes from her trivial task and see that she had been tricked into a prison.  That very day he had wanted to cry out to her, as impersonally as one feels towards a beautiful bird caught in a net, “Now, now, burst through, and spread your wings where you belong.”

It was like wiping up the floor with cloth of gold.  In order that those three perfectly commonplace, valueless human lives might be added to the world’s wretched population, a nature as rare as a jewel was being slowly ground away.  What were the treasures to whom she was being sacrificed?  Paul, the greasy, well-intentioned, priggish burgher he would make; Elly, almost half-witted, a child who stared at you like an imbecile when asked a question, and who evidently scarcely knew that her mother existed, save as cook and care-taker.  And Mark, the passionate, gross, greedy baby.  There were the three walls of the prison where she was shut away from any life worthy of her.