She had forgotten the almshouse, as she had said, but now, with the mention of it, it was coming back. She had forgotten it as people in pain forget the sweet time when they ran and leaped, as the long-crippled forget what it meant to hunt, and the long-married forget what it was to love. Yet with her, as with all the rest, it was there in her darkened mind, a far, shining country at the back of beyond, a clear, golden country at the edge of the coloured sea. And suddenly there rose up in her a great longing and a great cry—the passionate, anguished cry of her vanishing, life-long dream. She had been utterly wrong, then, so she said to herself, from start to finish, from beginning to end. There was no reward, after all, for honest toil, and still less for childlike, trusting faith. God, or whoever looked after things up above—or who didn’t look after them, as seemed much more likely—allowed you to work and believe and hope for forty years, and then at the end of them cancelled your heart’s desire. Even with a perfectly justified heart’s desire it was just the same, a natural, praiseworthy heart’s desire that couldn’t do anyone any harm. Suddenly He demolished your ancient castle in Spain, and as He demolished it He also laughed. Mrs. Clapham felt that laugh thrill through her in every nerve, as if it had been through the medium of Emma He had chosen to laugh. Yet Emma herself did not look like laughing at the moment, was not so much as wearing her Giaconda smile. Her attitude was her usual one of repression and watchful calm, but behind it was a suggestion of unusual fear and strain. Mrs. Clapham, however, was engaged with another problem than that of Emma’s expression. Her imagination, once more released upon the joyous venture from which it had been dragged, was living again through the wonderful morning and afternoon. Once more she felt the breathless rapture of expectation, followed by the more tranquil rapture of the accomplished fact; and once again journeyed on that voyage of discovery which came to an end on Hermitage Hill. She thought of the women with whom she had made friends, the tea-party, the butcher, and always, always of the house. They—by “they” she meant the Almighty and Emma, somehow intermixed in her mind—had allowed her to have all that. They had given her the cup of those hours, pressed down and running over, and then they had emptied the cup and laughed. It was either muddle or mockery, however you looked at it, and to one of Mrs. Clapham’s simple, orderly spirit it was hard to say which was worse. And suddenly she felt that, muddle or mockery, she wasn’t able to bear it. The child in her which had played with the toys of old Mr. T. rose and clung stubbornly to the House of Dreams. Emma was talking again, she found, still standing there, still filling her with that hatred of God and her roundabout self.