XI

The crushing of full realisation, piling up behind her numbness, must pass over her. There was not much time. The train was carrying her steadily onward, and towards conversation with the unconscious Brooms. She tried to relax to its movement, to hold back from the entanglements of thought and regard the day as an interval outside the hurrying procession of her life. A way opened narrowly ahead, attainable by one rending effort, into a silence, within which the grey light filtering through the dingy windows on to the grime-greyed floor offered itself with a promise of reassurance. It was known to her; by its unvexed communion with her old self. One free breath of escape from the visions she was holding clutched for inspection, and herself would be given back to her. This awful journey would change to an eternity following serenely on a forgotten masquerade. She would not lose her knowing that all solitary journeys go on forever, waiting through intervals, to renew themselves. But the effort, even if she could endure the pain of it, would be treachery until she had known and seen without reservations the whole meaning of the immovable fact. The agony within her must mean that somewhere behind the mere statements, if she could but get through and discover it, there must be a revelation that would set the world going again; bring back the vanquished sunlight. Meanwhile life must pause, humanity must stay hushed and waiting while she thought. A grey-shod foot appeared on her small empty patch of floor. With the fever of pain that flooded her she realised that she could go neither forward nor back. Life pinned her motionless, in pain. Her eye ran up and found the dreaming face of a girl; the soft fresh lineaments of childhood, shaped to a partial awareness by some fixed daily toil, but still, on all she saw, the gleam she did not know could disappear, did not recognise for what it was, priceless and enough. She would never recognise it. She was one of those women men wrap in lies, persisting unchanged through life, revered and yet odious in the kindly stupidity of