Here for an instant her mind stood rigid for the old order. Then her thoughts, like waters when the dam breaks, overwhelmed it, came rushing and tumbling over each other, sweeping away the last remnants of opposition. And that was why—and that was why she was going up to the Priory that very morning—up to his den—to smash up his old eggs! That would wake him up! Smash up his old eggs—that would wake him up! That would wake him up!... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIX We grow. We acquire. Do we change? We talk of the formation of character, as if character were not already triumphant in the infant that defies its father and seduces its grandmother months before it can speak. We talk of character—but do we not mean habit? Daily, weekly, yearly, we add to our habits, literally our habits, our garments, the Joseph-coats of manner and custom, of tolerance and caution and indifference, in which we clothe and conceal ourselves, our unchanging, unchangeable selves, old as age, young as youth, sexless, amoral, unconvinced by human logic, unbound by human laws. And for years we—I, with a hole in my stocking, and you, Collaborator, incapable of any such thing, and Martha in the kitchen, and the Kaiser at Potsdam, train up ourselves in the way we should go and criticize our neighbours’ departure therefrom without a thought for our sleeping partner, biding his time within us. But when his time comes, in emergency, in crisis, then, as sure as you sit there knitting, Collaborator, that original self wakes up, with a rending of garments, and takes charge. But, when the occasion is over and it has sunk to sleep again, it is we—our bewildered, protesting surface selves who have to take the consequences. That explains, I imagine, why it is always the most unlikely people who behave in the most incongruous way, and why John Smith (condemn him or admire him as we may) remains the last person we should have expected to murder his great-uncle or marry the princess, or why Laura Valentine, who loved Justin more deeply than even his mother did (I cannot put it higher) and had a fine sense of humour of her own, should yet be setting out at ten o’clock of the morning of the last Sunday in June, convinced that by the smashing of his birds’ eggs she would save his soul alive, and that there was nothing ridiculous in the situation.