Night-long, through open windows, thick, distorted voices in strife. Shut in, maddened. Maddened confined man. Women despairingly mocking. Worst of all, children’s voices sane and sweet in protest, shrilling up, driven by fear, beyond the constriction of malformed throats, into sweetness. And she had heard _nothing_. But this same thickness or dullness had kept her unaware of what it was that in the end had turned this stuffy little back room into a refuge. She did not know that there were sounds more intolerable than those coming in from the street. The street sounds varied. Were sometimes obliterated by wind and rain, and were at their worst only at the height of the summer. And even at their worst they were life, fierce and coarse, driving off sleep; but real, exciting. Only unendurable because there was no hope during their lifetimes of any alteration in the circumstances within which all these people were confined. But those other sounds never varied. And spoke of death. That was the worst, that they filled the room with the sense of death and the end. They cast a long shadow backwards over the whole of life, mocking it. Night after night they had to be anticipated and then lived through. One by one. To come home late was not to escape them. They were all there collected in the quiet room. Centring in the imagined spectacle of the teeth waiting in their saucer for the morning. To sleep early was to wake to the splutter of a match and see the glare of candlelight come through the porous curtain. To hear with senses sharpened by sleep, the leisurely preparations, the slow careful sipping, the weary sighing, muttered prayers, the slow removal of the many unlovely garments, the prolonged swishing and dripping of the dismal sponge. All heralding and leading at last to the dreadful numb rattle of vulcanite in the basin. Yet the worst to bear was the discovery of the hatred these innocent sounds could inspire. Still there unchanged, pure helpless hatred, rising up as it had risen in childhood, against forced association with unalterable personal habits.... But the shock of discovering that hatred anew, finding I have not moved on, only been lulled into good humour by solitude, did not lessen the first joy of the little back room. For a while, in spite of the ugly things in it, and the never-ending reek streaming in through the window, the joy remained. There was that night when I sat writing until morning. Once more able to expand and think. And the air seemed as pure as if it had come in over the country-side.... And something of the first joy has remained. A lower tone. But still here. In the quietude. In the certainty of deep sleep and a happy mood in the morning. 2