“Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to work for me.”

“Their lives are industrialised and hopeless, and so are ours,” she cried.

“I don’t think they are. That’s just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism. You don’t look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.”

Which was true. For her dark-blue eyes were flashing, her colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed, in the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so wrong , yet she couldn’t say it to him, she could not say exactly where he was wrong.