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In these latter days they had become a very silent couple; they said scarcely a word to each other that night, but each followed a private train of thought. In the small hours, as Elizabeth lay awake, Denton started up beside her suddenly–he had been lying as still as a dead man.

“I cannot stand it!” cried Denton. “I will not stand it!”

She saw him dimly, sitting up; saw his arm lunge as if in a furious blow at the enshrouding night. Then for a space he was still.

“It is too much–it is more than one can bear!”

She could say nothing. To her, also, it seemed that this was as far as one could go. She waited through a long stillness. She could see that Denton sat with his arms about his knees, his chin almost touching them.

Then he laughed.

“No,” he said at last, “I’m going to stand it. That’s the peculiar thing. There isn’t a grain of suicide in us–not a grain. I suppose all the people with a turn that way have gone. We’re going through with it–to the end.”

Elizabeth thought grayly, and realised that this also was true.

“We’re going through with it. To think of all who have gone through with it: all the generations–endless–endless. Little beasts that snapped and snarled, snapping and snarling, snapping and snarling, generation after generation.”

His monotone, ended abruptly, resumed after a vast interval.

“There were ninety thousand years of stone age. A Denton somewhere in all those years. Apostolic succession. The grace of going through. Let me see! Ninety–nine hundred–three nines, twenty-seven–three thousand generations of men!–men more or less. And each fought, and was bruised, and shamed, and somehow held his own–going through with it–passing it on…. And thousands more to come perhaps–thousands!

“Passing it on. I wonder if they will thank us.”

His voice assumed an argumentative note. “If one could find something definite … If one could say, ‘This is why–this is why it goes on….'”

He became still, and Elizabeth’s eyes slowly separated him from the darkness until at last she could see how he sat with his head resting on his hand. A sense of the enormous remoteness of their minds came to her; that dim suggestion of another being seemed to her a figure of their mutual understanding. What could he be thinking now? What might he not say next? Another age seemed to elapse before he sighed and whispered: “No. I don’t understand it. No!” Then a long interval, and he repeated this. But the second time it had the tone almost of a solution.

She became aware that he was preparing to lie down. She marked his movements, perceived with astonishment how he adjusted his pillow with a careful regard to comfort. He lay down with a sigh of contentment almost. His passion had passed. He lay still, and presently his breathing became regular and deep.

But Elizabeth remained with eyes wide open in the darkness, until the clamour of a bell and the sudden brilliance of the electric light warned them that the Labour Company had need of them for yet another day.

That day came a scuffle with the albino Whitey and the little ferret-faced man. Blunt, the swart artist in scrapping, having first let Denton grasp the bearing of his lesson, intervened, not without a certain quality of patronage. “Drop ‘is ‘air, Whitey, and let the man be,” said his gross voice through a shower of indignities. “Can’t you see ‘e don’t know ‘ow to scrap?” And Denton, lying shamefully in the dust, realised that he must accept that course of instruction after all.

He made his apology straight and clean. He scrambled up and walked to Blunt. “I was a fool, and you are right,” he said. “If it isn’t too late …”

That night, after the second spell, Denton went with Blunt to certain waste and slime-soaked vaults under the Port of London, to learn the first beginnings of the high art of scrapping as it had been perfected in the great world of the underways: how to hit or kick a man so as to hurt him excruciatingly or make him violently sick, how to hit or kick “vital,” how to use glass in one’s garments as a club and to spread red ruin with various domestic implements, how to anticipate and demolish your adversary’s intentions in other directions; all the pleasant devices, in fact, that had grown up among the disinherited of the great cities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, were spread out by a gifted exponent for Denton’s learning. Blunt’s bashfulness fell from him as the instruction proceeded, and he developed a certain expert dignity, a quality of fatherly consideration. He treated Denton with the utmost consideration, only “flicking him up a bit” now and then, to keep the interest hot, and roaring with laughter at a happy fluke of Denton’s that covered his mouth with blood.