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several with fiery eruptions of mange, walked among their masters. Their tongues lolled out and their tails drooped between their legs. They had all come a long way.
    In the last cart of all, a very clean and stately old lady sat bolt upright. She shone like a washed star in that filthy company and she wore a prim, green dress such as Worker women wore. Her hair was done up in a knot and she wore stockings and shoes. She was obviously of some consequence in the tribe. A youngish man walked beside her, talking to her, but Marianne could not see his face because he wore a soft, wide-brimmed hat of felt pulled down over his forehead. Many of the Barbarians wore such hats. There were about sixty men, women and children in this long procession. They scarcely exchanged a word with one another, not even the children, but moved in the silence of near exhaustion.
    Marianne had a clean bed and quiet sleeps. Watching these cruelly dispossessed survivors go by, she was glad she lived in the tranquil order of the Professors; she had never been glad of it before. The fearful strangers now revealed their true faces and these faces were sick, sad and worn. Two or three Soldiers could have gunned them all down as they walked and she sensed that hardly one of the Barbarians would have had the heart to draw their own weapons to defend themselves. All would fall down as if bitterly appreciative of a chance to rest. She forgave them their depredations for they had so little. Then the man on the donkey came following them with the child running beside him on the end of his chain. The man and his donkey were now hung with baskets of plants and the child’s arms were full of greenstuff.
    This man glanced suspiciously around him as if he guessed there were spies in the hedgerow. She shrank back among the leaves and he, too, passed by, kicking his donkey to an unwilling trot to catch up with the rest. The child blubbered with the effort of keeping up. Marianne did not know where they were all bound but she hoped it was not her home. It was a long way home.
    When she finally arrived home, so late the gate was locked and she had to explain her absence to the guards, she found something had happened that wiped the Barbarians out of her mind. In a fit of senile frenzy, the old nurse had killed her father with an axe and then poisoned herself with some stuff she used for cleaning brass. The Colonel of the Soldiers, her mother’s brother, took Marianne to live with him in the Barracks. She kept her father’s books for a time but found she could notbear to read them and in the end she burned them. She took his clock out to a piece of swamp and drowned it. It vanished under the yielding earth, still emitting a faint tick. She found a pair of scissors and chopped off all her long, fair hair so she looked like a demented boy. She had no idea why she cropped her head; the impulse seized her. It made her very ugly and she examined her ugliness in mirrors with a violent pleasure. When she looked for the scissors again, convinced there was some other violation she could perform upon herself, she could not find them, nor could she find any knives.
    ‘This place is like a grave,’ she said to her uncle.
    ‘There is not enough discipline,’ he said. ‘That old woman was maladjusted. She should have been given treatment.’
    This was the way the Soldiers talked.
    ‘She loved us when we were alive,’ said Marianne without realizing what she was saying. Appalled, she corrected herself: ‘I mean, when I was young.’
    ‘She was seriously maladjusted,’ said her uncle, crashing his fist upon the table. ‘She should have been subjected to tests and then operated upon.’
    He pierced Marianne with a shrewd, assessing glance, as if suspicious of her. He decided she should be taken out of herself.
    ‘Learn to drive a car,’ he said. ‘Then you could go out with the convoys to the other communities and see a bit of life.’
    He was so determined to subject her