....... The many Christmasses with the Brooms had been part of her long run of escape from the pain-shadowed family life; their house at first a dream-house in the unbroken dream of her own life in London, a shelter where agony was unknown, and lately a forgetfulness, for the long days of the holiday, of the challenge that lived in the walls of her room. For so long the walls had ceased to be the thrilled companions of her freedom, they had seen her endless evening hours of waiting for the next day to entangle her in its odious revolution. They had watched her in bleak daylight listening to life going on obliviously all round her, and scornfully sped her desperate excursions into other lives, greeting her empty glad return with the reminder that relief would fade, leaving her alone again with their unanswered challenge. They knew the recurring picture of a form, drifting, grey face upwards, under a featureless grey sky, in shallows, “unreached by the human tide” and had seen its realisation in her vain prayer that life should not pass her by; mocking the echoes of her cry, and waiting indifferent, serene with the years they knew before she came, for those that would follow her meaningless impermanence. When she lost the sense of herself in moments of gladness, or in the long intervals of thought that encircled her intermittent reading, they were all round her, waiting, ready to remind her, undeceived by her daily busy passing in and out, relentlessly counting its secret accumulating shame. During the last three months they had not troubled her. They had become transparent, while the influence of her summer still had them at bay, to the glow shed up from the hours she had spent downstairs with Mrs. Bailey, and before there was time for them to close round her once more, the figure of Michael Shatov, with Europe stretching wide behind him, had forced them into companionship with all the walls in the world. She had been conscious that they waited for his departure; but it was far away out of sight, and when she should be once more alone with them, their attack would find her surrounded; lives lived alone within the vanquished walls of single poor bare rooms in every town in Europe would come visibly to her aid, driving her own walls back into dependence.