Bathing in the waters of Lethe and Eunoe unworthily is drinking one's own damnation. But happiness crops up before one can prevent it. Perhaps happiness is one long sin, piling up a bill.... It is my secret companion. Waiting at the end of every dark passage. I did not make myself. I _can't_ help it. * * * * * Brilliant ... _brilliant_; and someone was seeing it. There was no thunderstorm, no clouds or pink edges on the brilliant copper grey. She wandered on down the road hemmed by flaring green. The invisible sun was everywhere. There was no air, nothing to hold her body separate from the scene. The grey brilliance of the sky was upon the pavement and in the green of the park, making mauve shadows between the trees and a mist of mauve amongst the further green. The high house fronts stood out against the grey, eastern-white, frilled below with new-made green, sprouting motionlessly as you looked ... white plaster houses against the blue of the Mediterranean, grey mimosa trees, green-feathered lilac of wisteria. Between the houses and the park the road glared wooden grey, dark, baked grey, edged with the shadowless stone grey of the pavement. Summer. Eternity _showing_.... * * * * * The Euston Road was a narrow hot channel of noise and unbreathable odours, the dusty exhausting cruelty of the London summer, leading on to the feathery green floored woods of Endsleigh Gardens edged by grey house fronts, and ending in the cool stone of St. Pancras Church. * * * * * In the twilit dining-room one's body was like a hot sun throbbing in cool dark air, ringed by cool walls holding darkness in far corners; coolness poured out through the wide-open windows towards the rain-cool grey facades of the opposite houses, cool and cool until the throbbing ceased. * * * * * All the forms seated round the table were beautiful; far-away and secret and separate, each oneself set in the coming of summer, unconscious. One soul. Summer is the soul of man. Through all the past months they had been the waiting guests of summer. * * * * * The pain of trying to get back into the moment of the first vision of spring, the perfect moment before the thought came that spring was going on in the country unseen, was over. The moment came back of itself ... the green flush in the squares, the ripples of emerald fringed pink geraniums along the balconies of white houses. * * * * * After dinner Miriam left the dining-room, driven joyfully forth, remaining behind, floating and drifting happily about, united with everyone in the room as her feet carried her step by step without destination, going everywhere, up through the staircase twilight.... * * * * *