She wanted to think: she wanted to lie in the arm-chair there with the window a little open and the evening air coming from the park across Portland Place curiously scented like the sea. As she lay back in her chair her body seemed fragile, and, almost, in its abandonment, exhausted. Under the black eyes her cheeks and neck were very white, and her black hair gave it all the intensest setting. She _was_ tired, horribly tired, and she wondered, vaguely, as she lay there how she was ever to manage this life that, in three days' time, she must take up and carry, a life that offered, perhaps, a little freedom, a little release, but so many, so many terrors. As her gaze took in the little room--its grey paper, a photograph of Uncle John, a book-case with poets, some miscellaneous and untidy-looking novels, and a number of little red Carlyles, a china cockatoo with an impertinent stare, a copy of Furze's "Ride," and a water-colour of red Munich roofs signed "Mary," a tiny writing-table with one old yellow photograph of a sad dark woman in a silver frame--these things were, it seemed the only friendly things she knew. Outside this room there was her grandmother, the house, London, the world--more and more horrible as the circles grew wider and wider. At the mere thought of the things that she must, in three days' time, face, her heart began to beat so that she could scarcely breathe, and, with that beating, came the iron determination that no one should ever know. She could not remember a time when these two emotions had not come together. She saw, as though it had happened only an hour ago, a tiny child in a black frock stumbling across endless deserts of carpet towards someone who looked older and more curious than anything one could have conceived possible. Someone sitting in a high carved chair, someone leaning on a stick, with two terrifying great dragons behind her. The child was seized with such a panic that her breath came in little pumping gasps, her legs quivered and trembled, her mouth was open, her eyes like saucers. And then, suddenly, after what had seemed a century of time, there came the thin trembling voice: "Why, the child's an idiot!" Since that awful day Rachel had determined that "no one should ever know." There had come to her, at that moment, the knowledge that round every corner there might lurk dragons and a witch. Sometimes they were there, sometimes they were not, but always there was the terror before the corner was turned.