He must go out, but he must wait first for Mamma as he could not find his way about. Their walks were terrifying very often, crossing a street Mamma would lose her head, pulling on his arm this way and that while death in a car rushed down on them and passed in a swirl, gathering the air after it, and all the time he was trying not to show how frightened he was. Then, when they were on the pavement at last, people had no mercy on you if it was crowded; you were always being jostled, and broken ends of conversation were jumbled up and thrown at you, and then presences would glide past leaving a snatch of warm scent behind them to tantalise. He was continually running into dogs, he trod on them, and they howled till their owners became angry and then apologised when they realised that you were not as others were. In the country you had been able to forget that you were blind. Everything was pressing down on him to-day, crowding in on him, dragging him down. And now that the window was shut and the sun cut off by the blind he felt suffocated. A barrel-organ was thudding a tune through the window, beating at the threshold of his brain. He got up and groping towards the window opened it. As he did so there was a sudden lull in all the noise, he could only hear the clop-clop of a horse receding into the distance, and then mysteriously from below there floated up a chuckle; it was a woman and someone must have been making love to her, so low, so deep it was. He was on fire at once. Love in the street, he would write of it, love shouting over the traffic, unsettling the policemen, sweeping over the park, wave upon wave of it, inciting the baboons to mutiny in the Zoo, clearing the streets. What was the use of his going blind if he did not write? People must hear of what he felt, of how he knew things differently. The sun throbbed in his head. Yes, all that, he would write all that. He was on the crest of a petulant wave, surging along, when his wave broke on the sound of a motor horn. There were his scars, and the sun pricked at him through them. He drew back into the room, his face wet with the heat. Oh, he was tired. As he searched for his chair a flower poked its head confidingly into his open hand, but he crushed it, for what had he to do with flowers now? Why did Mamma leave him alone, a prey to all his thoughts? They must go out, Mamma and he, but he felt so ill. And was she happy here, away from Barwood and all the worries that she had lived for? As for him, it was only that he was dazed by all these new sensations, he would rise above them soon, when he knew how to interpret them, and then he would have some peace. A car was pulled up sharp, the brakes screamed and he writhed at it. He was imprisoned here, for somehow he could not learn to find his way about in this new house. Why didn’t she come?