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her meat, the real substance of money. The well-groomed
showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among
themselves for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was
nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among
the indispensables, the bone-bringers.
But under Mrs Bolton’s influence, Clifford was tempt-
ed to enter this other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by
brute means of industrial production. Somehow, he got his
pecker up.
In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie
never did. Connie kept him apart, and made him sensitive
and conscious of himself and his own states. Mrs Bolton
made hint aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began
to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.
He even roused himself to go to the mines once more:
and when he was there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub
he was hauled out into the workings. Things he had learned
before the war, and seemed utterly to have forgotten, now
came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub, with the
underground manager showing him the seam with a pow-
erful torch. And he said little. But his mind began to work.
He began to read again his technical works on the coal-
mining industry, he studied the government reports, and
he read with care the latest things on mining and the chem-
istry of coal and of shale which were written in German. Of
course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far
as possible. But once you started a sort of research in the
field of coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study
of by-products and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was

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