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be without emotion. She did not believe in roots; yet they ran as deeply in hers as in any human heart and bled as bitterly when severed. They did not believe in roots, Hester and her generation; they believed in the swift, unflinching adaptibility that roots menaced, or made impossible. And perhaps they were not altogether wrong, thought Monica, still pausing, still gazing at the resolute young figure, the future, was it not?—as she herself was the past. Roots meant sweetness, security, sameness; the old found again in the new; continuity and bondage. They gave you as reward a flower, and Hester’s world moved too quickly for such slow rewards. It was a world of machinery, rather; of things you made and used and cast aside; things of which you remained master and that never mastered you. Roots mastered you; and perhaps the world of the future was a world of change, of swift improvisation, where ruthlessness and decision were the price of survival. It was difficult for her eyes to foresee what beauty there might be in such a world, yet Hester, sitting there in her ruthlessness, was not alien to her. It was better to cut through and escape if withering were the doom of persistency, and not only one’s own withering, but that of those one loved. They refused the discipline of tradition,