His touch would be too like a betrayal of another
touch ... somewhere, sometime, somehow ... in that tantalising dream
that refused to allow itself either to be fully remembered or quite
forgotten. What was that dream? What was it?... She continued to gaze into the fire. Of a sudden she sprang to her feet with a choked cry of almost animal
fury. The fool had touched her. Carried away doubtless by the memory of
that afternoon by the windmill, he had, in passing once more to the
kettle, crept softly behind her and put a swift burning kiss on the side
of her neck. Then he had retreated before her, stumbling against the table and causing
the cups and saucers to jingle. The basket-chair tilted up, but righted itself again. "I told you--I told you--" she choked, her stockish figure shaking with
rage, "I told you--you--"

He put up his elbow as if to ward off a blow. "_You_ touch me--_you!--you!_" the words broke from her. He had put himself farther round the table. He stammered. "Here--dash it all, Bessie--what is the matter?" "_You_ touch me!" "All right," he said sullenly. "I won't touch you again--no fear. I
didn't know you were such a firebrand. All right, drop it now. I won't
again. Good Lord!" Slowly the white fist she had drawn back sank to her side again. "All right now," he continued to grumble resentfully. "You needn't take
on so. It's said--I won't touch you again." Then, as if he remembered
that after all she was ill and must be humoured, he began, while her
bosom still rose and fell rapidly, to talk with an assumption that
nothing much had happened. "Come, sit down again, Bessie. The tea's in
the pot and I'll have it ready in a couple of jiffs. What a ridiculous
little girl you are, to take on like that!... And I say, listen! That's a
muffin-bell, and there's a grand fire for toast! You sit down while I run
out and get 'em. Give me your key, so I can let myself in again--"

He took her key from her bag, caught up his hat, and hastened out. But she did not sit down again. She was no calmer for his quick
disappearance. In that moment when he had recoiled from her she had had
the expression of some handsome and angered snake, its hood puffed, ready
to strike. She stood dazed; one would have supposed that that ill-advised
kiss of his had indeed been the Master Word she sought, the Word she felt
approaching, the Word to which the objects of the Museum, the book, that
rustle of a sea she had never seen, had been but the ever "warming"
stages. Some merest trifle stood between her and those elfin cries,
between her and that thin golden mist in which faintly seen shapes seemed
to move--shapes almost of tossed arms, waving, brandishing objects
strangely all but familiar. That roaring of the sea was not the rushing
of her own blood in her ears, that rosy flush not the artificial glow of
the cheap red lampshade. The shapes were almost as plain as if she saw
them in some clear but black mirror, the sounds almost as audible as if
she heard them through some not very thick muffling....

"Quick--the book," she muttered. But even as she stretched out her hand for it, again came that solemn
sound of warning. As if something sought to stay it, she had deliberately
to thrust her hand forward. Again the high dinning calls of "Hasten! Hasten!" were mingled with that deeper "Beware!" She knew in her soul
that, once over that terrible edge, the Dream would become the Reality
and the Reality the Dream. She knew nothing of the fluidity of the thing
called Personality--not a thing at all, but a state, a balance, a
relation, a resultant of forces so delicately in equilibrium that a
touch, and--pff!--the horror of Formlessness rushed over all. As she hesitated a new light appeared in the chamber. Within the frame of
the small square window, beyond the ragged line of the chimney-cowls,
an edge of orange brightness showed. She leaned forward. It was the full
moon, rusty and bloated and flattened by the earth-mist. The next moment her hand had clutched at the book. _"Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye
So many, and so many, and such glee? Why have ye left your bowers desolate,
      Your lutes, and gentler fate? 'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing A-conquering! Bacchus, young Bacchus! Good or ill betide
We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide! Come hither, Lady fair, and joined be
      To our wild minstrelsy! '"_

There was an instant in which darkness seemed to blot out all else; then
it rolled aside, and in a blaze of brightness was gone. It was gone, and
she stood face to face with her Dream, that for two thousand years had
slumbered in the blood of her and her line. She stood, with mouth agape
and eyes that hailed, her thick throat full of suppressed clamour. The
other was the Dream now, and these!... they came down, mad and noisy
and bright--Maenades, Thyades, satyrs, fauns--naked, in hides of beasts,
ungirded, dishevelled, wreathed and garlanded, dancing, singing,
shouting. The thudding of their hooves shook the ground, and the clash of
their timbrels and the rustling of their thyrsi filled the air. They
brandished frontal bones, the dismembered quarters of kids and goats;
they struck the bronze cantharus, they tossed the silver obba up aloft. Down a cleft of rocks and woods they came, trooping to a wide seashore
with the red of the sunset behind them. She saw the evening light on the
sleek and dappled hides, the gilded ivory and rich brown of their legs
and shoulders, the white of inner arms held up on high, their wide red
mouths, the quivering of the twin flesh-gouts on the necks of the leaping
fauns. And, shutting out the glimpse of sky at the head of the deep
ravine, the god himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who
slept with the serpents coiled about them. Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with
libidinous laughter and beating one another with the half-stripped
thyrsi, they poured down to the yellow sands and the anemonied pools of
the shore. They raced to the water, that gleamed pale as nacre in the
deepening twilight in the eye of the evening star. They ran along its
edge over their images in the wet sands, calling their lost companion. "Hasten, hasten!" they cried; and one of them, a young man with a torso
noble as the dawn and shoulder-lines strong as those of the eternal
hills, ran here and there calling her name. "Louder, louder!" she called back in an ecstasy. Something dropped and tinkled against the fender. It was one of her
hairpins. One side of her hair was in a loose tumble; she threw up the
small head on the superb thick neck. "Louder!--I cannot hear! Once more--"

The throwing up of her head that had brought down the rest of her hair
had given her a glimpse of herself in the glass over the mantelpiece. For
the last time that formidable "Beware!" sounded like thunder in her ears;
the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was
cutting into her throbbing throat.