The walls swept up dimly striped with rose and green, the green misty and changeful, glossy or dull as you moved. And on the widest spaced wall dreadful presences ... two long narrow dark-framed pictures, safe and far-off and dreamy in shop windows, but now, shut in here, suddenly full of sad heavy dreadful meaning. A girl, listening to the words she had waited for, not seeing the youth who is gazing at her, not even thinking of him, but seeing suddenly everything opening far far away, and leaving him, going on alone, to things he will never see, joining the lonely women of the past, feeling her old self still there, wanting everyone to know that she was still there, and cut off, for ever. There was something ahead; but she could not take him with her. He would see it now and again, in her face, but would never understand. And the other picture; the girl grown into a woman; just married, her face veiled forever, her eyes closed; sinking into the tide, his strong frame near her the only reality; blindly trying to get back to him across the tide of separation. Their child will come--throwing even the support of him off and away, making her monstrous ... and then born into life between them, forever, “drawing them together,” showing they were separate; between them, forever. There was no getting away from that. The strange strong crude odours breathing quietly out from the open lid of the new piano seemed to support them, to make them more mockingly inexorable. 7 The smell of the piano would go on being there while inexorable things happened. Voices were sounding in the garden.... Hanging on either side of the mantelpiece were two more pictures--square green garden scenes.... There was relief in the deeps of the gardens and in under the huge spreading trees that nearly filled the sky. There were tiresome people fussing in the foreground ... Marcus Stone people--having scenes--not noticing the garden; getting in the way of the garden. But the garden was there, blazing, filled with some particular time of day, always being filled with different times of day. There would be in-between times for Harriett--her own times. Times when she would be at peace in this room near the garden. Away from the kitchen and strange-eyed servants, and from the stern brown and yellow pig-skin dining-room. In here she would have fragrant little teas; and talk as if none of those other things existed. There were figures standing at the French window. 8 She opened the window upon Harriett and Gerald. Standing a little aloof from them was a man. As Harriett spoke to her Miriam met his strange eyes wide and dark, unseeing; no, glaring at things that did not interest him ... desperate, playing a part. His thin squarish frame hung loosely, whipped and beaten, within his dark clothes. His eyes passed expressionlessly from her face to Harriett.