She was going back to her own life. Back to the civilized pains of art: its nostalgia for lost simplicity, its full and generous tolerance, its self-studious doubt, its divinely useless mirth, its disregard of things not worth discussing among the cheerfully disenchanted. Ah, never try to explain things you know are true. As soon as you begin to do that, they seem doubtful. A darkness kept coming into the picture. It was as though the silence that had been stored up in that house was now draining out of it, seeping into the absorbent air. The fog was thickening and distorted perspectives. The house was out of drawing. That tricky shadow under the balcony was baffling: it made the whole porch seem out of plumb. Holding up a brush to get a true horizontal, she saw that Martin was coming across the lawn. “Why, it’s Bunny!” he said, pointing to the figure she had suggested with a few hasty strokes. “I know now why she wanted you to help me.” Joyce did not look up. “You must go, at once,” she said. “I was lying in bed, waiting for it to be time to get up. I saw that some of the wallpaper, by the window, was torn. When I looked at it I found the mouse pattern underneath. It’s the old nursery.” “That’s what Bunny meant! Go and look in the cupboard, see if you can find it, the mouse I gave you. That’s your only chance.” “I think I understand now.” “You mean, you know that we’re the same----” “Yes, that this is what we’re all coming to. Except Bunny ... and--and you. _You_ haven’t done it, not quite....” “Martin, I’m worst of all,” she cried. “I’m neither one nor the other.” “No, I think Ben is the worst,” he said slowly. “It’s too bad; he was such a nice boy. Of course George is pretty awful, but I didn’t know him before.” “Quick, go away. Don’t try to learn too much. You must go for _their_ sake. If they find out who you are----” She had a sick presentiment that they must hurry. And still he lingered, and she could feel Time sloping toward some bottomless plunge. “Perhaps I don’t want to go. There’s something I don’t quite understand. You all look at each other so queerly: look, and then turn away. And you and George in the garden. What is it? What’s happened that hurts you all so?” How could she answer? How tell him that the world is often too fierce for its poor creatures, overstrains and soils them in their most secret nerves; and that with all their horrors they would not have it otherwise. He had come like the unspoiled essence of living, groping blindly for what it divines to be happy and real and true; he was thwarted and damned by the murderous pettiness of his own scarred brethren. If I had two friends called Food and Hunger, I’d never introduce them to each other. Must she, who was born to love him, be the one to tell him this? “You _must_ go. Don’t you see, it isn’t only us. It’s you too. You and George.... Oh, I tried not to tell you. George is just you grown up.” He looked at her, appalled.