‘I could smell it was an earthquake coming when I got up. Didn’t I say so, Emily?’ ‘You and your smells!’ said Jimmie Fernandez. ‘You’re always smelling things!’ ‘She’s awfully good at smells,’ said the youngest, Harry, proudly, to John. ‘She can sort out people’s dirty clothes for the wash by smell: who they belong to.’ ‘She can’t really,’ said Jimmie: ‘she fakes it. As if every one smelt different!’ ‘I can!’ ‘Dogs can, anyway,’ said John. Emily said nothing. Of course people smelt different: it didn’t need arguing. She could always tell her own towel from John’s, for instance: or even knew if one of the others had used it. But it just showed what sort of people Creoles were, to _talk_ about Smell, in that open way. ‘Well, anyhow I said there was going to be an earthquake and there was one,’ said Margaret. That was what Emily was waiting for! So it really had been an Earthquake (she had not liked to ask, it seemed so ignorant: but now Margaret had said in so many words that it was one). If ever she went back to England, she could now say to people, ‘_I have been in an Earthquake_.’ With that certainty, her soused excitement began to revive. For there was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it. Realise that if she had suddenly found she could fly it would not have seemed more miraculous to her. Heaven had played its last, most terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed. Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen to her anything so dangerous, so sublime. Meanwhile, Margaret and Jimmie were still arguing: ‘Well, there’s one thing, there’ll be plenty of eggs to-morrow,’ said Jimmie. ‘There’s nothing like an earthquake for making them lay.’ How funny Creoles were! They didn’t seem to realise the difference it made to a person’s whole after-life to have been in an Earthquake. When they got home, Martha, the black housemaid, had hard things to say about the sublime cataclysm. She had dusted the drawing-room china only the day before: and now everything was covered again in a fine penetrating film of dust. iv The next morning, Sunday, they went home. Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies. The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered. But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able to see anything, or realise that any one else pretended to even a self-delusive fiction of existence. Their mother met them at the door. She bubbled questions: John chattered ponies, but Emily was still tongue-tied. She was, in her mind, like a child who has eaten too much even to be able to be sick.