The tears of women! How from the beginning of time they had washed away every kind of evil thing, every kind of deviltry! Down the centuries had flowed those tears, clearing our race’s conscience from poisons, washing clean the mind of man from the torture of rational logic, washing it clean from the torture of memory, recreating it, fresh, careless, free, like a child new-sprung from the womb! But how could such a wide, dark, wet stain upon those pink roses have come from so small a skull!

He didn’t dare to speak to her as he pressed his hands upon the back of that familiar sofa and stared across her form, curved there like a dusky tree-root, into the dying fire.