“I am in deep woods,
  Between the two twilights. 
  Over valley and hill
  I hear the woodland wave
  Like the voice of Time, as slow,
  The voice of Life, as grave,
  The voice of Death, as still....”

2

The voices, the young loud clear voices of Gerda and of Kay, shrilled down from the garden, and Esau yapped in answer.  They were calling her.  They had probably been to wake her and had found her gone.

Neville smiled (when she smiled a dimple came in one pale brown cheek) and swung herself down from the beech.  Kay and Gerda were of enormous importance; the most important things in life, except Rodney; but not everything, because nothing is ever everything in this so complex world.

When she came out of the wood into the garden, now all golden with morning, they flung themselves upon her and called her a sneak for not having wakened them to bathe.

“You’ll be late for breakfast,” they chanted.  “Late on your forty-third birthday.”

They each had an arm round her; they propelled her towards the house.  They were lithe, supple creatures of twenty and twenty-one.  Between them walked Neville, with her small, pointed, elfish face, that was sensitive to every breath of thought and emotion like smooth water wind-stirred.  With her great violet eyes brooding in it under thin black brows, and her wet hair hanging in loose strands, she looked like an ageless wood-dryad between two slim young saplings.  Kay was a little like her in the face, only his violet eyes were short-sighted and he wore glasses.  Gerda was smaller, fragile and straight as a wand, with a white little face and wavy hair of pure gold, bobbed round her thin white neck.  And with far-set blue eyes and a delicate cleft chin and thin straight lips.  For all she looked so frail, she could dance all night and return in the morning cool, composed and exquisite, like a lily bud.  There was a look of immaculate sexless purity about Gerda; she might have stood for the angel Gabriel, wide-eyed and young and grave.  With this wide innocent look she would talk unabashed of things which Neville felt revolting.  And she, herself, was the product of a fastidious generation and class, and as nearly sexless as may be in this besexed world, which however is not, and can never be, saying much.  Kay would do the same.  They would read and discuss Freud, whom Neville, unfairly prejudiced, found both an obscene maniac and a liar.  They might laugh with her at Freud when he expanded on that complex, whichever it is, by which mothers and daughters hate each other, and fathers and sons—­but they both all the same took seriously things which seemed to Neville merely loathsome imbecilities.  Gerda and Kay didn’t, in point of fact, find so many things either funny or disgusting as Neville did; throwing her mind back twenty years, Neville tried to remember whether she had found the world as funny and as frightful when she was a medical student as