"Tell her to _eat_ the banana and lie down." Alma, Rose Gauntlett, Mrs. Perry and me, starting off just after I came, to paddle in the moonlight.... "Don't, _don't_ do anything that would make a cabman laugh." Why not? Why should he always imagine someone waiting to be shocked? Damn the silly cabman if he _did_ laugh. Who need care? As soon as her head was on the pillow, nothing visible but the huge night and the stars, she spoke quietly to herself, flouting them. He should see, hear, that it was wicked to simmer stuffily down as if they were in the house. He didn't want to. She was making his sounds for him. "Tell Miriam this is not a conversazione." His voice was actually sleepy. Kindly, long-suffering, but simply wanting to go to sleep. There was to be no time of being out in the night with him. He was too far off. She imagined herself at his side, a little space of grass between. Silent communication, understanding and peace. All the things that were lost, obliterated by his swift speech, communicated to him at leisure, clear in the night. Here under the verandah, with its roof cutting off a part of the sky, they were still attached to the house. Alma had been quietly posed for sleep from the first moment. They were all more separated than in their separate rooms indoors. The lingering faint light reflected the day, the large open space of misunderstandings, held off the cloak of darkness in which things grew clear. She lay watching for the night to turn to night. But the light seemed to grow clearer as the stillness went on. The surrounding objects lost their night-time mystery. Teased her mind with their names as she looked from point to point. Drove up her eyes to search for night in the sky. But there was no night there. Only a wide high thinness bringing an expansion of sight that could not be recalled; drawing her out, beyond return, into a wakefulness that was more than day-time wakefulness; a breathless feeling of being poised untethered in the thin blue-lit air, without weight of body; going forward, more and more thinly expanded, into the pale wide space.... There is no night.... Compared to this expanse of thin, shadowless, boundless light the sunlit sky is a sort of darkness.... Even in a motionless high midday the sky is small, part of it invisible, obliterated by light. After sunset it is hidden by changing colours.... _This_ is the real sky, in full power, stripping away sleep. Time, visible, pouring itself out. Day, not night, is forgetfulness of time. Its movement is a dream. Only in its noise is real silence and peace. This awful stillness is made of sound; the sound of time, _pouring_ itself out; ceaselessly winding off short strips of life, each life a strip of sleepless light, so much, no more, lessening all the time.