Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/351



IT'S passionate progress was a very rapid one.

Ingeniously learning, no matter how, that Molly Pentreath went daily to her club and drank China tea, and that the path she chose lay through Hyde Park, he became a loiterer when his work allowed him to loiter.

But not as a suppliant. How the fierceness came upon him was beyond his comprehension, nor did he attempt to comprehend it when the leaves were showing, and the gilliflowers were smelling, and even those London trees splintered the sun's lances on shields of green. If Sorrell had shown a fierceness in his struggles with the luggage, his son showed an equal fierceness in this love affair.

As Molly wrote of him in her diary—"No 'if you please' at all. Came striding down on me like a young Berserker; eyes all blue north wind and sea scud. All that he, needed was redressing, a winged helmet, a hauberk, a shield, and a sword. Anyway—you know where you are with him."

She did, and she did not—but that was to be a subsequent discovery. For to feel convinced that you are ten years ahead of the most advanced of your contemporaries, and not to allow that yau are also the child of your hotblooded and ancestral past is to challenge complexities—the most modern of problems, how to eat your cake and have it. Kit disturbed her. She was supremely frank with herself over the sex-reaction as she called it.

She met him too with a level-eyed fearlessness. No feminine tricks. He wanted her and she knew it; the apple was nothing but an apple. He was waylaying her almost daily, and she took no trouble to avoid him; she sailed her ship on the same course, and when his Viking galley came surging down on her she gave him battle. For it was a battle, Norseman and Southern woman, as far apart as their seas, looking at life with different eyes, and