earth like a spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled.

‘In the end,’ she said to herself, ‘I shall go away from him.’

‘I can be free of her,’ he said to himself in his paroxysms of suffering.

And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.

‘Where shall I go?’ he asked himself.

‘Can’t you be self-sufficient?’ he replied to himself, putting himself upon his pride.

‘Self-sufficient!’