Leaving Eleanor abruptly in darkness in her bedroom she shut the door and stepped into freedom. The cistern gurgled from the upper dark freshness. Her world was uninvaded. Klah-rah _Buck_, in reverent unctuousness, waiting for responsive awe from those sitting round. He meant Clara Butt. Then she had been to Canada. He had expected.... Little Mrs. Hurd had sat birdlike at a Morning Musical hearing the sweep of the tremendous voice. I have never heard it, but I know how it rolls tremendously out and sweeps. I can hear it by its effect on them. They would not believe that. Rounding the sweep of the little staircase she was surprised by a light under the box-room door. Mrs. Bailey, at midnight, busy in the little box-room? How could she find room to have the door shut? Her garret felt fresh and free. Summer rain pattering on the roof in the darkness. The _Colonisation of Ulster_. Her mind turned the pages of a school essay, page after page, no red-ink corrections, the last page galloping along one long sentence; "until England shall have recognised her cruel folly." 10; _excellent_, E.B.R. A fraud and yet not a fraud. Never having thought of Ireland before reading it up in Green, and then some strange indignation and certainty, coming suddenly while writing; there for always. I had forgotten about it. A man's throat was cleared in the box-room. The tone of the wandering voice.... Mrs. Bailey had screwed him into that tiny hole. _I'll_ be all _right_.... What a shame. He must not know anyone knew he was there. He did not know he was the first to disturb the top landing.... He did not disturb it. There were no English thoughts in there, nothing of the downstairs house. Julia Doyle, Dublin Bay, _Clontarf_; fury underneath, despairing of understanding, _showing_ how the English understood nothing, themselves nor anyone else. But the Irish were not people ... they did not care for _anything_. Meredith was partly Celtic. _That_ was why his writing always felt to be pointing in some invisible direction. He wrote so much because he did not care about anything. Novelists were angry men lost in a fog. But how did they find out how to do it? Brain. Frontal development. But it was not certain that that was not just the extra piece wanted to control the bigger muscular system. Sacrificed to muscle. Going about with more muscles and a bit more brain, if _size_ means _more_, doing all kinds of different _set_ pieces of work in the world, each in a space full of problems none of them could agree about. 5 "_Gracious._ You'll ave to be up early in the morning to say all those names dear." CHAPTER X