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the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the liv-
ing blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot
of bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it
would need a new hope.
Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of
nothingness In her life that affected her. Clifford’s mental
life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. Their
marriage, their integrated life based on a habit of intimacy,
that he talked about: there were days when it all became ut-
terly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words.
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy
of words.
There was Clifford’s success: the bitch-goddess! It was
true he was almost famous, and his books brought him in
a thousand pounds. His photograph appeared everywhere.
There was a bust of him in one of the galleries, and a por-
trait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern
of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for pub-
licity, he had become in four or five years one of the best
known of the young ‘intellectuals’. Where the intellect
came in, Connie did not quite see. Clifford was really clev-
er at that slightly humorous analysis of people and motives
which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather
like puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that
it was not young and playful, but curiously old, and rather
obstinately conceited. It was weird and it was nothing. This
was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed at the bottom of
Connie’s soul: it was all flag, a wonderful display of noth-
ingness; At the same time a display. A display! a display! a

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