“No man is worthy of a woman’s love,” I answered.  “No woman is worthy of a man’s.  I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot alter.”

“There’s others,” she would muse.

“Not for me,” I said.  “No!  I didn’t fire a shot that time; I burnt my magazine.  I can’t begin again, mother, not from the beginning.”

She sighed and said no more then.

At another time she said—­I think her words were:  “You’ll be lonely when I’m gone dear.”

“You’ll not think of going, then,” I said.

“Eh, dear! but man and maid should come together.”

I said nothing to that.

“You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear.  If I could see you married to
some sweet girl of a woman, some good, kind girl------”

“Dear mother, I’m married enough.  Perhaps some day------ Who knows? 
I can wait.”

“But to have nothing to do with women!”

“I have my friends.  Don’t you trouble, mother.  There’s plentiful work for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out from him.  Nettie was life and beauty for me—­is—­will be.  Don’t think I’ve lost too much, mother.”

(Because in my heart I told myself the end had still to come.)

And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me.

“Where are they now?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Nettie and—­him.”

She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts.  “I don’t know,” I said shortly.

Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.

“It’s better so,” she said, as if pleading.  “Indeed . . . it is better so.”

There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment took me back across an epoch, to the protests of the former time, to those counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It, that had always stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me.

“That is the thing I doubt,” I said, and abruptly I felt I could talk no more to her of Nettie.  I got up and walked away from her, and came back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch of daffodils for her in my hand.

But I did not always spend my afternoons with her.  There were days when my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be alone; I walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new interest and relief in learning to ride.  For the horse was already very swiftly reaping the benefit to the Change.  Hardly anywhere was the inhumanity of horse traction to be found after the first year of the new epoch, everywhere lugging and dragging and straining was done by machines, and the horse had become a beautiful instrument for the pleasure and carriage of youth.  I rode both in the saddle and, what is finer, naked and barebacked.  I found violent exercises were good for the states of enormous melancholy that came upon me, and when at last horse riding palled, I went and joined the aviators who practised soaring upon aeroplanes beyond Horsemarden Hill. . . .  But at least every alternate day I spent with my mother, and altogether I think I gave her two-thirds of my afternoons.