She sat down exactly where she was; her foot went on bleeding, but she did not notice it.  The slight pain had done its work in jerking her to an awareness of her body.

“Oh, my goodness,” she said out aloud, “I’m caught!  I’m chained!  Louis was right when he said I didn’t understand about these hungers.  Oh, my goodness, it’s like Louis’s feet take him to a whisky bottle.  My feet were simply coolly walking me off to waken him up.”

She sat motionless, scarcely breathing.  Her heart began to thump unpleasantly and she felt a flush tingling down to her feet and to the tips of her fingers.

“If I hadn’t torn my foot then I’d have given way to that blaze—­and each time you give way to a thing it chains you a bit more!  I’d never have had a chance to sit cool and think it out, because I’d have forgotten, before I knew where I was, that it needed thinking out at all.  I’d have wakened him by now.”

This jerked her, wakened her, widened her.  Swiftly she was able to see that Louis, on his whisky chase, de Quincy on his opium chase, King David, Solomon, Nelson, Byron and Kraill on their woman chase were not perhaps so fortunate as to get a nail jabbed in their feet, pulling them up sharp and giving them time to think.

“There I’ve been blaming them a bit—­pitying them a lot!  Heavens, I was superior!” she said.

The sun came up out of the sea and looked at her.

“Because I didn’t know,” she told it.  “I was superior!  Because I’d never felt the pull of a chain.”

She thought the sun took on a horribly knowing, superior expression.

Another rather shaking thought came.  Since her recollection of the blameless fool that first night in Sydney she had sought the bookshops for the text of “Parsifal” and had found it, a ragged copy for twopence, in a second-hand bookshop near the station.  She had been puzzled when Parsifal, trying to free himself from the enchantment of the witch-woman’s embrace, had suddenly been confronted by her exultant: 

“And so then, with my kiss,
The world’s heart have I shewn thee? 
In my soft arms enfolded
Like to a god thou’llt deem thee.”

“Yes, that’s it,” she cried.  “Oh, you old sun, listen to the speciousness of it all!  Listen—­I mustn’t let Louis hear, because he’d be hurt.  He isn’t my Lover, my Knight at all.  He’s just the same thing to me as women used to be to the Knights—­he’s something to rescue, to deliver from bondage.  And—­just like those beautiful, soft women, he’s—­he’s a sort of seduction to me.  Oh—­it’s horrible!”

She waited a minute tensely.  Thought always came to her in flashes.

“And so are all men.  They’re all in bondage.”

The sun seemed to have a big, fat, knowing face.  One of his eyes winked at her.

“Here am I getting myself into a chain that’s going to drag at me every time I’m fighting for him.  This—­this softness, this love-making and all the thrill of it—­it’s going to make holes in my armour and stuff them up with—­crepe de Chine!”