Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up to the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind--what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and again through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the people one never meets again. James Moggridge is dead now, gone for ever. Well, Minnie--"I can face it no longer." If she said that--(Let me look at her. She is brushing the eggshell into deep declivities). She said it certainly, leaning against the wall of the bedroom, and plucking at the little balls which edge the claret-coloured curtain. But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?--the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world--a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. "I can bear it no longer," her spirit says. "That man at lunch--Hilda--the children." Oh, heavens, her sob! It's the spirit wailing its destiny, the spirit driven hither, thither, lodging on the diminishing carpets--meagre footholds--shrunken shreds of all the vanishing universe--love, life, faith, husband, children, I know not what splendours and pageantries glimpsed in girlhood. "Not for me--not for me." But then--the muffins, the bald elderly dog? Bead mats I should fancy and the consolation of underlinen. If Minnie Marsh were run over and taken to hospital, nurses and doctors themselves would exclaim.... There's the vista and the vision--there's the distance--the blue blot at the end of the avenue, while, after all, the tea is rich, the muffin hot, and the dog--"Benny, to your basket, sir, and see what mother's brought you!" So, taking the glove with the worn thumb, defying once more the encroaching demon of what's called going in holes, you renew the fortifications, threading the grey wool, running it in and out. Running it in and out, across and over, spinning a web through which God himself--hush, don't think of God! How firm the stitches are! You must be proud of your darning. Let nothing disturb her. Let the light fall gently, and the clouds show an inner vest of the first green leaf. Let the sparrow perch on the twig and shake the raindrop hanging to the twig's elbow.... Why look up? Was it a sound, a thought? Oh, heavens! Back again to the thing you did, the plate glass with the violet loops? But Hilda will come. Ignominies, humiliations, oh! Close the breach.