She sat upright. She stared across the table at the boy. Harry said, “Here, steady, old man. ‘What’s the use of Scripture?’” “Well, what is the use? It’s all rot. You know it isn’t true.” Time flashed his blade and struck her terribly. She called out dreadfully, “Huggo!” “Mother, you know it’s all made up!” She cried out in a girl’s voice and with a girl’s impulsive gesture of her arm across the table towards him, “It isn’t! It isn’t!” Her voice, her gesture, the look upon her face could not but startle him. He was red, rather frightened. He said mumblingly, “Well, mother, you’ve never taught me any different.” She was seen by Harry to let fall her extended arm upon the table and draw it very slowly to her and draw her hand then to her heart and slowly lean herself against her chair-back, staring at Huggo. No one spoke. She then said to Huggo, her voice very low, “Darling, run now to see everything is in your playbox. Doda, help him. Take Benji, darlings. Benji, go and see the lovely playbox things.” When they had gone she was seen by Harry to be working with her fingers at her key-ring. In one hand she held the ring, in the other a key that she seemed to be trying to remove. It was obstinate. She wrestled at it. She looked up at Harry. “I want to get this”--the key came away in her hand--“off.” He recognised it for her office pass-key. Caused by that cry of hers to Huggo and by that ges-ture with her cry, and since intensifying, there had been a constraint that he was very glad to break. He remembered how childishly proud she had been of that key on the day it was cut for her. They had had a little dinner to celebrate it, and she had dipped it in her champagne glass. He said, “Your pass-key? Why?” She said, “I’m coming home, Harry.” “Coming home?” She was sitting back in her chair. She tossed, with a negligent movement of her hand, the key upon the table. “I have done with all that. I am coming home.” He got up very quickly and came around the table to her. PART FOUR--HOUSE OF CARDS CHAPTER I There is a state wherein the mind, normally the court of pleas where reason receives and administers the supplications of the senses, is not in session. Reason is sick, suspends his office, abrogates his authority, withdraws to some deep fastness of the brain, and suffers the hall of judgment to be the house of license or of dreams: of dreams, as sleep, as vanity of reverie; of license when there is tumult in the body politic, as fever, as excesses of the passions, as great shock. Reason is sick, withdraws, and there is strange business in that place. If that is just the way one writes, not susceptible of easy comprehension, and not enough explanatory of Rosalie’s condition, it goes like this in Rosalie’s own words. Drooped back there in her chair before that littered disarray of lunch, and that key lying there, and Harry stooping over her and holding both her hands, she said, “Oh, Harry! Oh, Harry! I feel deathly sick.”