“I shouldn’t have come here,” she said. “I love it too much. Those trees. They look so surprised. I have a guilty passion for pine trees.” Driving the faithful car had strengthened George. Even the paltriest has an encouraged sense of competence with that steady tattoo underneath his feet. The artist that lay printed like a fossil in George’s close-packed heart--the artist that only Joyce had ever relished--always responded to the drum of the engine. He adored the car; when he drove alone to the Island (sending the family by train) he sang to her most of the way. This was _his_ guilty passion. Now it was the car’s rhyming vitality that came to his rescue. He broke the glass. He cut himself, but he got through. “Any kind of love is too much,” he said. Then he was grieved to find himself uttering such a cheap oracle; but it comforted Joyce because she saw it was a symptom. It showed that he was trying to tell the truth. She did not dare look at him: she was too conscious of the others behind them, who seemed as massively attentive as an audience in a theatre. Then in a wave of annoyance, Surely I have a right to look where I want? She did so. She could see the confidential tilt of his eyebrow so plainly, she knew he was hers for the taking. Nothing but themselves could stand between them. “How queer: that’s just what I was thinking,” she told the eyebrow. “Oh, do you believe in telepathy?” chirped Ruth. “Ben sometimes knows exactly what I’m thinking without my saying a word.” It can’t happen often, George thought. “What were you laughing at?” he found time to ask her, as the others were descending from the car. “I was just thinking, there’s not much danger of my meeting God, because I’m not pure in heart.” * * * * * “Oh, I shall be perfectly comfortable anywhere,” she said. The single swathe of sunshine carved the hall, dividing it into two dusks as the word _Now_ divides one’s mind. All, all unchanged: the series of hemispherical bronze gongs at the dining-room door, the wakeful asthma of the tall clock, the wide banistered stairway with its air of waiting to creak. The soft, gold-sliced shadow trembled with small sounds, and light voices of children drifted down from above. If this was still real, then what was her life of to-day? Why pretend any longer to make the world seem reasonable? It was all a delightful ironic farce with an audience applauding the wrong moments and the Author gritting his teeth in the wings. What use was Time if it availed so little?