“But here we begin,” he protested, wondering at the jealous terror that possessed her. “We shall go on from this for ever. Nothing is taken away. We build and build. In a few years, when I——”
“Oh!” she cried, “in a few years—who knows? We don’t break free so easily as this, John. The net sweeps wider than we know. It yields—that’s its strength. And presently it draws us in again. So it will go on—till the breaking.... You see, even you and I go on strengthening it, making new meshes despite ourselves. If ever we are to stand together in the world, first you have to gain money and power. You have to fight. Then—it’s inevitable—we would have to teach our children to fight—equip them for ‘the battle of life!’ And they would look round to find themselves in our net.
“But it’s going to end. The world will change its motive when this motive of gain has made it suffer so terribly, so obviously, that it realizes the cause of its suffering. We have to suffer—we or our children. It’s near now. The whole system may smash—the good with the bad—perhaps that’s the only way; and we may slip back into the Dark Ages again. I don’t know....”
“But now——” John said.
“Now? Yes—that’s ours.... Oh, for God’s sake! touch me and hold me as if you would never, never let me go....”
And presently, standing away from him, she was saying with composure: “Let’s go back. It’s getting dark. Look how the colour is fading from the sea.”
They went up the beach to the edge of the tree belt. There she checked him. Turning, they looked down upon their tracks to where, in the instant now gone by, the sand had been roughed and broken by their feet. Soon the water, which from the gathering darkness had drawn its first gleams of phosphorescence, would smooth their footprints away.