One or two of them laughed. She could now recognize the three faces in front of her. Jennifer must be somewhere by the fireplace. There was constraint in the room. She thought with awful jealousy: ‘Ah, they hate my coming. They thought they were getting rid of me at last. They come here secretly without me, to insinuate themselves. They all want her. They have all hated me always.’ She said: ‘Give me a cigarette, someone.’ Jennifer’s voice broke in suddenly with a sort of harsh clangour. From her voice, Judith knew how wild her eyes must be. ‘Here, here’s a cigarette, Judith.... Have something to eat. Or some cocoa. Oh--there was a bottle of cherry-brandy, but I believe we’ve finished it.’ Horrible confusion in her voice, a stumbling hurry of noise.... ‘I have just licked up the last dregs,’ said a deep voice. ‘Who’s that who spoke then?’ said Judith softly and sweetly. ‘Oh ...’ cried Jennifer shrilly, ‘Geraldine, you haven’t met Judith yet.’ What was she saying? Geraldine Manners was staying the week-end, no, was wrestling on the lawn with her; had just arrived, no, had been in the room for months, since the summer, for they were such very great friends.... ‘How do you do? I’m guessing what you are like from the way you speak,’ said Judith softly, laughingly. ‘Oh, I’m no good at that.’ How bored, how careless a voice! ‘Shall I switch on the light?’ said someone. ‘No!’ said Judith loudly. She lifted up her arm against the window. The kimono sleeve fell back from it, and it gleamed cold and frail in the moonlight, like a snake. She spread out her long fingers and stared at them. ‘I would like to be blind,’ she said. ‘I really wish I were blind. Then I might learn to see with my fingers. I might learn to hear properly too.’ And learn to be indifferent to Jennifer; never to be enslaved again by the lines and colours of her physical appearance, the ever new surprise and delight of them; learn, in calm perpetual darkness, how the eyes’ tyrannical compulsions had obscured and distorted all true values. To be struck blind now this moment, so that the dreadful face of the voice by the fireplace remained for ever unknown!... Soon the light would go on, and painfully, hungrily, with awful haste and reluctance, the eyes would begin their work again, fly to their target. ‘Don’t be absurd, Judith,’ said someone. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’; and went on to talk of work among the blind, of blinded soldiers, of St. Dunstan’s. The conversation became general and followed the usual lines: it was better to be deaf than blind, blind than deaf. Jennifer and Geraldine were silent. ‘Oh, it’s time we went to bed,’ said someone. ‘Jennifer, I must go to bed. I’m almost asleep. What’s the time?’ Now the light would go on. It went on. The room suddenly revealed its confusion of girls, cushions, chairs, cups, plates and cigarette-ends. Everybody was getting up, standing about and talking.