“Well, I didn’t make life and society.  I can only go my own way.”

Aaron too was silent.  A deep disappointment was settling over his spirit.

“Will you be alone all winter?”

“Just myself and Tanny,” he answered.  “But people always turn up.”

“And then next year, what will you do?”

“Who knows?  I may sail far off.  I should like to.  I should like to try quite a new life-mode.  This is finished in me—­and yet perhaps it is absurd to go further.  I’m rather sick of seekers.  I hate a seeker.”

“What,” said Aaron rather sarcastically—­“those who are looking for a new religion?”

“Religion—­and love—­and all that.  It’s a disease now.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Aaron.  “Perhaps the lack of love and religion is the disease.”

“Ah—­bah!  The grinding the old millstones of love and God is what ails us, when there’s no more grist between the stones.  We’ve ground love very small.  Time to forget it.  Forget the very words religion, and God, and love—­then have a shot at a new mode.  But the very words rivet us down and don’t let us move.  Rivets, and we can’t get them out.”

“And where should we be if we could?” said Aaron.

“We might begin to be ourselves, anyhow.”

“And what does that mean?” said Aaron.  “Being yourself—­what does it mean?”

“To me, everything.”

“And to most folks, nothing.  They’ve got to have a goal.”

“There is no goal.  I loathe goals more than any other impertinence.  Gaols, they are.  Bah—­jails and jailers, gaols and gaolers—–­”

“Wherever you go, you’ll find people with their noses tied to some goal,” said Aaron.

“Their wagon hitched to a star—­which goes round and round like an ass in a gin,” laughed Lilly.  “Be damned to it.”

Aaron got himself dressed, and the two men went out, took a tram and went into the country.  Aaron could not help it—­Lilly put his back up.  They came to a little inn near a bridge, where a broad stream rustled bright and shallow.  It was a sunny warm day, and Aaron and Lilly had a table outside under the thin trees at the top of the bank above the river.  The yellow leaves were falling—­the Tuscan sky was turquoise blue.  In the stream below three naked boys still adventurously bathed, and lay flat on the shingle in the sun.  A wagon with two pale, loving, velvety oxen drew slowly down the hill, looking at each step as if they were going to come to rest, to move no more.  But still they stepped forward.  Till they came to the inn, and there they stood at rest.  Two old women were picking the last acorns under three scrubby oak-trees, whilst a girl with bare feet drove her two goats and a sheep up from the water-side towards the women.  The girl wore a dress that had been blue, perhaps indigo, but which had faded to the beautiful lavender-purple colour which is so common, and which always reminded Lilly of purple anemones in the south.