“I can’t help being sorry, in a way, that the American gentleman’s not going to live there,” Sampson went on. “Heaps o’ money ’e has, heaps; an’ he told me he was goin’ to divide his custom fair between you an’ me----” But Wright still said nothing. All Miss Gregson’s custom went to him. Ursula ought to have been up at Grey Stone by now, but she lingered on in the shop, absorbed, anxious to hear more.... PART IV THE GIRL IN THE ROOM [I] IT was Ursula’s way to endure haphazard circumstances quietly and dreamily, for years; and then, inspired and shaken by sudden fierce impatience, to spring at them. For just beyond drastic alteration, just beyond the limit of things wrong, lay that right and glorious world for which she ached ... where whatever you did, you keenly wanted to do; where no time was wasted in sitting about among people whose speech and habits recurred monotonously from day to day; where the air was sharp and golden as early morning in early summer.... Oh, merely this world, this ordinary old world, but twisted round from hatefulness because you dared to twist it.... Surely those moments, rare and swift, when you were amazingly happy, confident, bewitched, and for no reason at all, surely, Ursula had argued once with Aunt Lavvy, they could be made permanent, if you could once find out the cause of them? And Aunt Lavvy with a wise little smile had lent her Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird.” Ursula groaned, but inwardly, for at this moment she worshipped Aunt Lavvy. “The Blue Bird”--the few pages she read of it were not bad; but the fairy-tale “humble cottage” of Tyltyl had seemed to have practically no connection with “The Laburnums.” Some people thought everything could be answered with a book. Ursula preferred, however, to puzzle and experiment without guides bound in soft calf. She had given up her room at home, hoping, in her impatience of days that were nothing special, with people who were burdened with false small misunderstandings as a dog is burdened with a tin can tied round its neck, that thus she might force access to a kingdom of perpetual ecstasy. She had given up the room ... and that was all there was to it. Sullenly she discounted sacrifice--and also, with the iconoclasm of sixteen-and-a-half, religion--“it all amounts to the same!”