After an hour she felt that she would go mad unless she found something to hold her mind back from those hideous channels into which it slipped so readily.  She snatched up the book which King had left with her, and forced herself to read.  Pages eluded her, but here and there single lines or words caught her attention as a thorny copse catches and plucks the garments of one going blindly through it.  So she was arrested by the line:  “In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth.”  And this was one of the times when she threw the book down and got up and walked back and forth impatiently.  It was almost as though King had left the wretched volume behind to be his spokesman in his absence; she told herself angrily that he was not like that, had never been like that.  He was a mere brute of a man, not “such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world.”  He was, rather, unthinkably crude and boorish and detestable.

But, rebelling at utter loneliness, she was forced again and again to the only companion at hand.  She read The Explorer, fascinated in a shivery, uncanny way by the first line, as though a ghostly voice were whispering to her from the black corners of the cave:  “There’s no sense in going further—­it’s the edge of cultivation.” And later:  “I faced the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down.” Others than she had gone into the last solitudes.  Others who had joyed in it and sung of it!  It was as though the dead shades of those others squatted at the edges of her fire and mocked at her.  Then she could fancy that it was King himself jeering, and that he cried:  “Then He chose me for His Whisper, and I’ve found it, and it’s yours!”

She snapped the book shut.  Later she opened it to the tale of Tomlinson.  She did not entirely grasp it, but she could not entirely miss what it said.  She hurried on; she wondered vaguely at the call of the Red Gods; here again, seeking distraction, she was whipped back to reality.  There were the lines, staring at her, as though King had rewritten Kipling: 

  “Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight? 
    Who hath heard the birch log burning? 
    Who is quick to read the noises of the night?”

And the answer was:  “Mark King.”  Even now it was a torturous twilight in the cave, even now she smelled wood-smoke; even now she was like one starting at the noises of the night....

“Man-stuff,” she thought contemptuously.  She had heard such an expression used in connection with the verses of this uncouth scribe.  It did not strike her that man-stuff might well enough be woman-stuff also, being one or the other, or both, for the sheer reason that it was human.  She chose to consider it merely the sort of coarse food for male mental digestion.  A man’s nature was not fine and intricate; rather his emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers, unskilled