“‘Liberty’s a glorious feast!’”

Trembling all over with the desire to express what was in her, Nedda stammered: 

“I would never keep anything that wanted to be free—­never, never!  I would never try to make any one do what they didn’t want to!”

She saw her aunt smile, and wondered whether she had said anything exceptionally foolish.  But it was not foolish—­surely not—­to say what one really felt.

“Some day, Nedda, all the world will say that with you.  Until then we’ll fight those who won’t say it.  Have you got everything in your room you want?  Let’s come and see.”

To pass from Becket to Joyfields was really a singular experience.  At Becket you were certainly supposed to do exactly what you liked, but the tyranny of meals, baths, scents, and other accompaniments of the ‘all-body’ regime soon annihilated every impulse to do anything but just obey it.  At Joyfields, bodily existence was a kind of perpetual skirmish, a sort of grudged accompaniment to a state of soul.  You might be alone in the house at any meal-time.  You might or might not have water in your jug.  And as to baths, you had to go out to a little white-washed shed at the back, with a brick floor, where you pumped on yourself, prepared to shout out, “Halloo!  I’m here!” in case any one else came wanting to do the same.  The conditions were in fact almost perfect for seeing more of one another.  Nobody asked where you were going, with whom going, or how going.  You might be away by day or night without exciting curiosity or comment.  And yet you were conscious of a certain something always there, holding the house together; some principle of life, or perhaps—­just a woman in blue.  There, too, was that strangest of all phenomena in an English home—­no game ever played, outdoors or in.

The next fortnight, while the grass was ripening, was a wonderful time for Nedda, given up to her single passion—­of seeing more of him who so completely occupied her heart.  She was at peace now with Sheila, whose virility forbade that she should dispute pride of place with this soft and truthful guest, so evidently immersed in rapture.  Besides, Nedda had that quality of getting on well with her own sex, found in those women who, though tenacious, are not possessive; who, though humble, are secretly very self-respecting; who, though they do not say much about it, put all their eggs in one basket; above all, who disengage, no matter what their age, a candid but subtle charm.

But that fortnight was even more wonderful for Derek, caught between two passions—­both so fervid.  For though the passion of his revolt against the Mallorings did not pull against his passion for Nedda, they both tugged at him.  And this had one curious psychological effect.  It made his love for Nedda more actual, less of an idealization.  Now that she was close to him, under the same roof, he felt the full allurement of her innocent warmth; he would have been cold-blooded indeed if he had not taken fire, and, his pride always checking the expression of his feelings, they glowed ever hotter underneath.