“How can one? What can one do with Justin? How can one get at him? He’s never been unhappy, or poor, or ill. He doesn’t know what anything means. What’s the use of being angry with him about Coral? Besides—they’re all such little things. He’s never done anything really wrong in his life.” And then, “I only wish he had. One could talk to him, tackle him then. But if I did talk to him, what could I say? It’s such little things. He’s like the man with one talent. I always did think that man was in the right really: _Lo, thou hast thine own!_ Justin’s perfectly justified. It’s I who am the fool. Why can’t I leave him alone?” She put her hand to her aching head. “I believe—I believe I think too much about Justin. I wish I could stop thinking——” But she could not. She was, for the first time in her life, in that mood which many women and all artists know, when the accumulated, unconscious thinking of many weeks, of many years sometimes, surges up and overflows the surface consciousness. It is in that naked hour that things—murders—masterpieces—happen. Those who know assert that it is not an experience to encourage and that when it is over you are collapsed, hysterical, and sleepless with fatigue. But Laura, who did not in the least understand what was happening to her, knew only with a vague discomfort that the world, the outer world, the harmonious web of sounds and shapes and colours that is the background of conscious life, had fallen apart, inexplicably and amazingly, into individual, unrelated facts. The buttons of the dusty railway cushions became important, importunate: the steeple on the sky-line, the pony’s swivel ear, were each and equally a nucleus upon which her thoughts settled like swarming bees, from which they lifted again in ominous, buzzing clouds; while the trivial sounds about her, the window straps padding against the doors, the rub-a-dub of hoofs, the unlatched gate clicketing in the wind, the hum of the twins’ voices in the next room, the very sigh and fall of her own breast, shaped themselves as the swing of the train had shaped itself, into words, into a whispering refrain of five words— “Wake him up! Wake him up! Afraid? Absurd!” “Wake him up! Wake him up! Afraid? Absurd!” Underneath her gossip and laughter with the boys, and her altercation with Aunt Adela as to when the trap should be ready and her necessary appreciation of Gran’papa’s concomitant and rounded jest—underneath the hurry of the dressing hour and her own delicious difficulties with hair and frock, she was nevertheless aware of that refrain. In spite of herself she listened, marked time to it, fled from it into the inmost recesses of her mind, and still listened to it as a sick woman listens to a fly roaming the room, or to a barrel-organ, devil-driven, in the street below.