her from; gardening; games; and hunting. She thought of hunting now, as she and Dick went down through the chestnut forest and came out upon the river level in the waning evening light. Hounds—darling hounds—and dear horses, and familiar faces that represented not so much individuals as types who did the same things as oneself; and had done so for generations. All the woodland lore; all the crafty knowledge of gate and wall and ditch; all the unvoiced awareness of beauty everywhere, in earth and sky. It was the only real life, of course, from her point of view, in its cool, cheerful comradeship, its risks and endurances; its ecstasies of flight over wide spaces. The artist's life always seemed to her like a queer make-believe in comparison; like a child's game without basis or consistency. Not that Dick was like the others;—those weedy, tiresome young men talking, talking—heavens! how they talked!—of planes and stresses in the London studios. Dick cared for them all as little, really, as she did. He was not gregarious. Under the paints and canvases he was the same sort of person that she was; silent, indifferent; out-of-doors. But it was funny to spend your life butting your head against a wall, as it were; for to try to capture, to express nature, came to no more than that; did it?—Jill sometimes tried to think it out. Was not nature something transcendent which one entered and partook of? Was not art like trying to dip up the sea in a tea-cup? A branch of bramble, whitened by hoar frost and glanced at as one waited in the woods on a morning of cub-
