The woman’s face lit up with an answering resentment and a mocking contempt for her fluent German. Too late she realised that Roman citizens do not speak German. But the details were settled, the interview was at an end, and the woman’s annoyance due perhaps only to the choice of the cheaper room. When she turned to shout instructions to the maid she became humanity, in movement, moving in twilight that for her too was going on its way towards the light of to-morrow. When the door was at last blessedly closed upon the narrow room whose first statements miscarried, lost in the discovery that even up here there was no change in the baked dry air, she made for the cool light of the end window but found in its neighbourhood not only no lessening but an increase of the oppressive warmth. The window was a door giving on to a little balcony whose wooden paling hid the floor of the valley and the bases of the great mountains across the way. The mountains were now bleak white, patched and streaked with black, and as she stood still gazing at them set there arrested and motionless and holding before her eyes an unthinkable grey bitterness of cold, she found a new quality in her fast closed windows and the exaggerated warmth. Though still oppressive they were triumphant also, speaking a knowledge and a defiance of the uttermost possibilities of cold. Cold was banished, by day and by night. For a fortnight taken from the rawest depths of the London winter there would be no waste of life in mere endurance. She discovered the source of the stable warmth in an unsightly row of pipes at the side of the large window, bent over like hairpins and scorching to the touch. The concentrated heat revived her weary nerves. At the end of the coil there was a regulator. Turning it she found the heat of the pipes diminish and hurriedly reversed the movement and glanced out at the frozen world and loved the staunch metallic warmth and the flavour of timber added to it in this room whose walls and furniture were all of naked wood. Turning to it in greeting she found it seem less small. It was small but made spacious by light. Light came from a second window that was now calling—a small square beside the bed with the high astonishing smooth billow of covering oddly encased in thin sprigged cotton—offering mountains not yet seen. The way to it was endless across the short room from whose four quarters there streamed, as she moved, a joy so deep that she brought up opposite the window as if on another day of life and glanced out carelessly at a distant group of pinnacles darkening in a twilight that was not grey but lit wanly in its fading, by snow.