Poor little monster, how unfortunate that he could not then have been given a hormone that would extrovert his budding perversion!
“She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed handsomeness and because they kept corners of dusk in which these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before Richard came in, and sit waiting in a browse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from the love of man for this was very much better than anything she could have had from Harry.”
Somewhat like the way the daughter of Senator Metellus Celere, called by some Claudia and by others Lesbia, arranged the visits of Catullus.
When Richard was sixteen he forced life's hand and leapt straight from boyhood into manhood by leaving school where he had shown great promise in science, and becoming a sailor so that he should be admirable to his mother. His wanderings took him to South America where he had great success in affairs of the heart and of the purse. It is with disposition of the latter that the book opens in the office of a lubricitous old Scotch solicitor where sits a young red-haired temperamental suffragette whimpering for the moon.
Ellen Melville is a lovable Celt of seventeen, and her creator displays a comprehensive insight into her mind and emotions. She is what Rebecca West once was and wished to be. It is sad that the pathway of her life leads so early to the Via Dura and that Richard Yaverland had not tarried in Vienna or Zurich to be psychoanalysed.
Richard falls in love with her at first sight. He woos her ardently, though simply, and she responds like a “nice” girl, like a girl who feels that for the endowment of that most wondrous thing in the world, the cerebral cortex, it is vouchsafed her to exercise restraints and make inhibitions which insects and animals cannot. In the highest sense she is rational and instinctive.
Ellen goes south to visit her future mother-in-law and a few days later Richard joins them. Roger meanwhile has “found Jesus,” and Poppy, a Salvation Army lassie, one stage removed from “Sin.” While knocking at Marion's door to gain entry that they may announce their intention to marry, their gaze floats upward and they see Ellen being kissed by the man to whom she will be married in three months. Roger, who is instinctive but not rational, puts a wrong interpretation upon it, and from that mal-interpretation the final tragedy flows. A few days later Marion realises there is no happiness for Richard and Ellen so long as she lives. She walks out into the marshes. Roger accuses Richard of driving his mother to it “because she saw that there was something wrong between you two.” He elaborates the accusation, and Richard drives a bread-knife into Roger's heart.
Richard knows his doom is sealed. So he invites Ellen to share a cattlemen's hut with him on the farther side of the creek where his mother had drowned herself, until the people come to take him—and to share it comprehensively.
“Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love and how like a doom that love had lain on him. Since life was like this she would not do what Richard asked.”
But she does.