Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/148

146 bond that unites two who are necessary and sufficient to one another. She did not altogether realise it herself. She thought no more about it than she could help, but it saddened her, and touched the cup of physical suffering that she must drink with a strange bitterness. The cost of love was after all, perhaps, in proportion to its sweetness; but one paid, not for love, but for the awful physical force that moved the human world, for its blind, impersonal hunger, for its primeval riot

So the world was made—so it must go on—and the tyranny of that necessity drove men like sheep. The will to live, of life conscious and unconscious, the physical instinct, cruel, wasteful, and careless—at times it seemed to her to make of human beings mere foolish puppets, without will or dignity. If this was the world, who would suffer to carry it on? Except that one must

Was it possible that she, too, had been caught in the mesh spread for all, and that love, that had seemed all joy and lightness, was only a cynical bait, set to entangle one?

When such thoughts beset her, she wished that she were religious, that she might see spirit and meaning governing the world, instead of brute force; but she could not see it. Happily, her dark moods were rather rare.

Basil came in now before the shadow had