"Lucky you!" the girl said, "I wish I was you. I've never been in the Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg." She went off with her great tray load, the table cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realised that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil . . . though the devil of course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppressions . . . if God then desired (and one couldn't object but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness. . . . But He had done it; no doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just? . . . Perhaps God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences. There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers, toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile inefficiency; with gross piles of hot-house flowers--that he detested for their exotic waxennesses!--with white enamelled panels that he disliked and framed, weak prints--quite genuine of course, my dear, guaranteed so by Sotheby--pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats, selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs. Satterthwaite, in négligé, but with an immense hat; reading the _Times_ with an eternal rustle of leaves because she never could settle down to any one page; and Sylvia walking up and down because she could not sit still, with a piece of toast in her fingers or her hands behind her back. Very tall; fair; as graceful, as full of blood and as cruel as the usual degenerate Derby winner. In-bred for generations for one purpose: to madden men of one type. . . . Pacing backwards and forwards, exclaiming: "I'm bored! Bored!"; sometimes even breaking the breakfast plates . . . And talking! For ever talking; usually, cleverly, with imbecility; with maddening inaccuracy; with wicked penetration, and clamouring to be contradicted; a gentleman has to answer his wife's questions. . . . And in his forehead the continual pressure; the determination to sit put; the _décor_ of the room seeming to burn into his mind. It was there, shadowy before him now. And the pressure upon his forehead. . . . Mrs. Wannop was talking to him now; he did not know what she said; he never knew afterwards what he had answered.