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Walter Raleigh, whose name is spelt, but not pronounced, like your bicycle. Our West Country still shelters Rawleys, your reverence, not Rallys.”
    “Go away, you impertinent fellow. And don’t puff smoke in my face. I told you never to come here again.”
    “All reet, all reet,” retorted Rippingall with spirituous amiability . “I came to wish your reverence the compliments of the season, together with——” puff, puff—“a Happy New Year.” He added, “In my father’s house are many—bicycles——”
    “Leave these premises at once!”
    Rippingall spun round, recovered, and pointing the whangee cane upwards with one hand, removed the brown bowler with the other and said, “I will go——” puff, puff—“tomy father——” puff, puff—“who is in heaven.”
    As January’s dull windows and leafless trees repeated themselves, so the form of Rippingall was in decline. Like most people of irregular sensibility, caused by an early malformation of the will and usually known as artistic temperament, Rippingall became untidy. He could be very smart indeed when in full starch, wax,and tail; but his bedroom was a mess, his kitchen—for Miss Kirkman had left her situation before Christmas—in disorder. He was ail-anyhow. Phillip felt that he had let-down Rippingall, given him a formless example—almost nothing to live for. Lacking someone to keep him in order, by example, Rippingall was reverting to the bottle. His sink was a greasy mess of old tea-leaves and potato-peelings. Glasses came on the table with the water-stains of porridge and bacon-fat residue.
    Phillip became more and more critical of Felicity and one day she departed, while he was in Colham, leaving behind a letter saying that she felt her presence was only a hindrance to him, and an obstruction to his writing.
    *
    Staring at the choked drainpipes under the lawn, the untidy cupboards, the chaotic woodshed and boiler-house, the scatter of toys everywhere in the day nursery—a room which Lucy said she liked to look “lived in”—Phillip told himself weakly that he needed order and competence about him so that he could do his writing, and keep on doing it, without strain. That work was for the future, the tidying up of human minds by ‘enacting a full look at the worst’, in the past; or rather the growing of young minds in a way entirely different from the past. What was needed, he told Lucy, was a revolution—but without bloodshed. Yet he knew that it must first begin with himself; while it seemed there was nothing to begin it with.
    *
    The newspapers told of struggle everywhere. Unemployed men, many without work since returning a dozen years ago from the Armies in France, Flanders, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, were sent from the Distressed Areas of the North to dig ditches in the South. Married men on the dole were paid 26 s . a week, out of which rent at 7 s . must be paid. Coal was 1 s. 6 d. a bag of 112 lbs, while the poor family’s main meal of the week was based on what was known as a butcher’s shilling bag—a bit of mutton, portion of black pudding , and scraps of stewing steak: a meal for two days. The butcher threw in ‘a bone for the dog’, out of which broth was made, with vegetables.
    Winter dullness held the valley. Frosts whitened the lawns. For three months sunshine ceased to enter the lower rooms of Monachorum House, which had dry rot under all floors. Then the top of the sun was seen again over the wooded crest of the Chase.

Chapter 3
HARD VOICES
    And every day at breakfast-time the sun’s curve rose a little higher over the hill. Missel-thrushes were in bold song, rooks speculating about their old nests. And with the primroses Felicity came back.
    The exterior alterations to Fawley House had been completed. The bill exceeded £ 1,200. One roof still required new rafters and purlins and slates.
    Every day a working party left Monachorum for Fawley, eighteen miles north on the Shakesbury-Colham road, and every