The husband of that wife scrabbled about abit like the lil
little creatures making a hole for themselves in the sand.

He was trying to divest himself of an irritation. - - -

Lb - - He got snappy. - - "You hurt me" he growled,
kicking her shins with his little scrabbly kxxx x feet.

Then something happened to him - - It seemed that that
annoyance which was his vitality - - dribbled out of him.

Esau fell back pale disgusted, exhausted
Sophia was shuddering, Is that what xxx gakk is called
ruining a woman ? "

"You may think it is in good taste to snub me" - - -
Esau pecked out those words 'good form' with the piping hau-
teur of british propriety - - - A tradition handy for set-
ting raw reason at a disadvantage.

Now for the first time, but only so slightly - she had an
ominous sensation of becoming enormous. Of standing over the
place where she knew Esau Penfold to be while she received kx
the pattering of those irritations that devastated him, and
which she was powerless to absorb.

"I have a passion for that wonderful woman Astral Neugat,
she has left me," he whined, " for Jerry the portrait - painter.
Ah how I long to learn how to be a good lover also."

He sat in the corner of the couch and waned 'waned '
He was fading away before her. His voice faded to the echo
of a reed.

"I cant think what is the matter with me - - - it must
be - - -" Esau whimpered like a whipped child. - -
- - - I couldn't help doing it - - I tried not to -
- I knew that it must drive me mad - - and the move I
thought I must go mad, the more and more I - - - . And

She watched Esau Penfold as he sat singing before her,
his long curved trunk with it's little legs like concertinas
in their creasy trousers.

He were

A woman's knitted jersey fastened with black bone buttons
on the left, garnished with an Indian sash and a necklet of
cornélians.

Suddenly he shot out his head and looked at her over his
back - - - - the tail of his flashed on her like a hiss!

She examined him to determine how this anatomical lighten-
ing was accomplished - his long neck was narrower at the
base than at the top.

As he conversed, he made other strange gestures. His
mouth was curved in such a way as to slightly reveal what
is called ' rose lip '. This tiny expanse of mucous membrane
he loved to caress with his third finger, slowly, ponderously,
lifting it to an expression of disgust.

At other times he pulled out the strange folds of skin
on his neck, to an extraordinary extension - - his flesh
was elastic.

Perplexingly - - -

The creature was telling her how to smoke out a bee - hive.

He lit some incense in a small bronze dragon, and dropped
his voice ---

"Do you know - - that you must be very good to me - -
I am half a man and half a woman".

A murky form seemed to swim across his green eyes as
he endeavoured to draw her in to them.

He turned to ALEXANDRA attend to his incense.

Again - - he was looking at her over his back.

The little bronze dragon had his head turned wrong way

uation of a tradition.

Even his observations were quotations.

"Jerry says that the reason Rejane was so fascinating to her lovers, was that she always knew the psychological moment to leave them."

All men who are not the masters of their own sex automatically - without being instructed - are blasé with women.

Esau concealed his impotence in his insolence - a veritable "instinct d'esprit". ( or instinct de l'esprit )

Thus, for Sophia, came to reside at Palms,

and Penfold had the remainder of a short lease of
a tower bestowed upon him by the colonial lord - artist who was
refused his lovership.

And he accepted it. For he enjoyed a sort of niggardly luck
in that he found nothing amiss with fortifying fertilising
his finances with his failures, matrimonial, amorous or otherwise.
His mental eye being fixed on infinitesimal and negligible
objects, little presents were constantly coming his way.
Those surplus trifles no longer necessary to their owners
fittingly into his service needs.

against his honour and his energy he pitted two hundred and
a year - - with two hundred pounds a year I can - I can exist!

The morose nostalgic female - as representing this sum,
be indefinitely attached to his domiciles, while his
les of tempered steelquivered with exasperation under her
scute condemnation of his minuscule motions and preoccupations.

A busy -body he was, for ever defacing some honest
raw material with his hands, while Sophia stared from her
annihilation at this vacuum drawing with a relentless parasitic suction her significance into it's mesquin necessity.

Their social life progressed.

Her face, as is the way with women who have come in contact
with the male vibration, he exploited in the drawing - rooms;
it lent him a certain notoriety that he should produce, just
when his stock of intriguing postures had reached the point of
exhaustion, so beautiful a wife.

Esau's studio was underground. L. L. the subterranean suited him. It contained some decent bits of old furniture and a byre Lady red couch.

But the furniture was huddled together indiscriminately. He decorated his ambiente without design.

In the middle of one wall hung an antique picture - frame of most subtle moulding, and in it was KN Penfold's pastel painting of a stout girl in a white shirt-waist.

The shadow under the nose had not been 'managed' and her chin stuck to her breast - the artist having miscalculated spatial accommodation for the neck.

Under this chin meandered a cravat of pink ribbon with little crinkled shadows, meticulously painted overtoned.

He was about to say with launghersconscionement - to-day, there was Penfold had a 'manner' as a host. He showed her the stethoscope of the Queen's physician, his grandmother's needles and thread, some cardboard octagons for making patchwork, a pebble from the Quirinal gardens, the urn containing the cremated remains of his aunt's pugg dog, his grandfather's copy book, his mother's bustle, a pair of her leg-of-mutton sleeves and his collection of cornelians.

While he was doing these honours KN - his eyes said suspiciously - Visitors are requested not to touch.

It was unnecessary - She scarcely breathed, fearing to blow the Esau, the bustle and the leg of mutton to limbo!

"Do you know" asked her entertainer "why Pawn - brokers hang three golden balls over their doors? They were the coat of arms of the merchants of Lombardy in the fifteenth century."

HE told her also that there is a certain fungus that only grows upon the back of a certain caterpillar, which in its turn is very rare, and that this fungus frequently attains

Butx Sophia was ashamed.

The idleness of those unflinching alien eyes presiding over
the daily swelling of her womb and breasts exploded in her sensibility.

To carry her loaded hips among the swarming social xfunzki
kizus receptions with this ever strange man's noses near her
fruit was an offence so monstrous!

After xhaafternoon Every afternoon about four o'clock, the
woman in her petticoat sat sobbing on the end of a camp-bed
while Esau Penfold trim and civilized in his suit, stood inexorable --- paring his nails.

The ancient clocks of the city struck the quarters, the
woman went on sobbing. The colour of the sky was changing
and Esau's patience failing.

Through the wet film on her eyes she could see the
nervy corugation of his face as he caught up her cloths from
a chair - back, and thrashed her over the head with them.

"Will you come to the party before everyone has left". M
he shrank.

He compelled her with his inflexible impotence.

Through the fine white dust of the twilight he drove Sophia
into the unbelievable society of Palms.

The atmosphere was pervaded by the almost hysterical relief
of reduced incomes on suddenly finding themselves encompassing
the palatial.

For in the old dwellings of Palms, long since deserted
by an attenuated aristocracy, there was an unusual lavishness of
space.

The Anglo-Saxon religion of ancestral halls revived in the bosom of poor relations among these towering pillars and vaulted ceilings carved with other people's coats of arms.

To identify these vast spaces with their proprietorship they had renounced the centres of their civilization xxx. They stacked them with old furniture and peculiar bric-a-brac, and lit them with the flattering and inexpensive illumination of oil lamps.