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for us. We must seem pretty poor stuff to you after your experience, but you don’t bother to hide it.’ She was blushing again, because of the effort it took her to tease him.
    He allowed himself to smile. Then his face stiffened, and, looking before him at the dirty wall, he said in a soft exalted voice: ‘Yes. It is hard to become a real communist, a communist in every fibre. It is hard, comrades. I remember when I first became a communist, I was given some words to learn by heart, and told to repeat them whenever I became filled with doubts or despondency.’ He raised his voice and quoted: ‘Man’s dearest possession is life; and since it is given to him to live but once, he must so live as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose; so live as not to be seared with the shame of a cowardly and trivial past; so live that, dying, he can say: All my life and all my strength was given to the finest cause in the world – the liberation of mankind.’ His face was strained with exaltation. He turned and went out, without speaking.
    ‘But I know that,’ said Marjorie, aggrieved. ‘I’ve got it written out and pinned over my bed.’
    ‘So do I,’ said Jasmine.
    ‘We all know it by heart,’ said Martha. They all felt misunderstood by Anton, and held to be smaller and less heroic than they were. ‘It was the first thing of Lenin’s I ever read,’ she added.
    ‘Well, we’ll have to live up to it,’ said Jasmine, speaking, as usual, in her demure, almost casual way.
    The three young women went together through the park, talking about the Soviet Union, about the Revolution, about ‘after the war’ – when, so it was assumed among them all, a fresh phase of the Revolution would begin, in which they would all be front-line fighters, fighters like Lenin, afraid of nothing, and armed with an all-comprehensive compassion for the whole of humanity.

Chapter Three
    Martha spent a good deal of time anxiously during the next few days because it seemed that she alone among ‘the group’ knew no one who was ‘ripe’. She had no relationships with anyone but the group, Mrs Buss and Mrs Carson. True that in her capacity as member of so many committees she had been presented suddenly with several dozen new acquaintances, all in love, in their various ways, with the Soviet Union because of the new, exultant public spirit; all willing to attend an indefinite number of meetings and lectures on the most diverse subjects. But she did not think they were ‘ripe’. She felt guilty that she had not been ‘working’ on them, so that at least some may have made the journey from a willing compliance with the yeasty new mood to the utter self-abnegation which was the essence of being ‘ripe’.
    The people who were going to be brought to the decisive meeting all had close personal ties with members of the group. Martha pondered over this, and decided she was at fault because she had spent too much time with William; that the ardour she had devoted to William would, had she been a real communist, as Anton used the word, have been spent on several people. But it was only with half her mind she was able to believe she had been at fault. If she had longed for nothing else steadily all these years it was for a close complete intimacy with a man. She realized it was not Jasmine who had made her a member of the group, but William. If, then, she wished to influence other people to join the group, she would have to give them what she had given William? But it was impossible.
    There is a type of woman who can never be, as they are likely to put it, ‘themselves’, with anyone but the man to whom they have permanently or not given their hearts. If the man goes away there is left an empty space filled with shadows. She mourns for the temporarily extinct person she can only be with a man she loves; she mourns him who brought her ‘self’ to life. She lives with the empty space at her side, peopled with the images of her own