In the evening some people came to supper; a writer and two painters, with their wives.  A grim evening—­never more so than when the conversation turned on that perennial theme—­the freedom, spiritual, mental, physical, requisite for those who practise Art.  All the stale arguments were brought forth, and had to be joined in with unmoved faces.  And for all their talk of freedom, Lennan could see the volte-face his friends would be making, if they only knew.  It was not ‘the thing’ to seduce young girls—­as if, forsooth, there were freedom in doing only what people thought ’the thing’!  Their cant about the free artist spirit experiencing everything, would wither the moment it came up against a canon of ‘good form,’ so that in truth it was no freer than the bourgeois spirit, with its conventions; or the priest spirit, with its cry of ‘Sin!’ No, no!  To resist—­if resistance were possible to this dragging power—­maxims of ‘good form,’ dogmas of religion and morality, were no help—­nothing was any help, but some feeling stronger than passion itself.  Sylvia’s face, forced to smile!—­ that, indeed was a reason why they should condemn him!  None of their doctrines about freedom could explain that away—­the harm, the death that came to a man’s soul when he made a loving, faithful creature suffer.

But they were gone at last—­with their “Thanks so much!” and their “Delightful evening!”

And those two were face to face for another night.

He knew that it must begin all over again—­inevitable, after the stab of that wretched argument plunged into their hearts and turned and turned all the evening.

“I won’t, I mustn’t keep you starved, and spoil your work.  Don’t think of me, Mark!  I can bear it!”

And then a breakdown worse than the night before.  What genius, what sheer genius Nature had for torturing her creatures!  If anyone had told him, even so little as a week ago, that he could have caused such suffering to Sylvia—­Sylvia, whom as a child with wide blue eyes and a blue bow on her flaxen head he had guarded across fields full of imaginary bulls; Sylvia, in whose hair his star had caught; Sylvia, who day and night for fifteen years had been his devoted wife; whom he loved and still admired—­he would have given him the lie direct.  It would have seemed incredible, monstrous, silly.  Had all married men and women such things to go through—­was this but a very usual crossing of the desert?  Or was it, once for all, shipwreck? death—­unholy, violent death—­in a storm of sand?

Another night of misery, and no answer to that question yet.

He had told her that he would not see Nell again without first letting her know.  So, when morning came, he simply wrote the words:  “Don’t come today!”—­showed them to Sylvia, and sent them by a servant to Dromore’s.