It was strange that it should be the house that had always caught her eye, as she crossed the square; one of the spots that always made the years of her London life show as a continuous communion with the rich brightness of the west-end. The houses round about it were part of the darker colour of London, creating even in sunlight the beloved familiar London atmosphere of dun-coloured mist and grime. But this house was a brilliant white, its windows fringed, during the season, with the gentle deep velvet pink of ivy-leaf geraniums and having, across the lower half of its façade, a fine close trellis of green painted wood, up which a green creeper clambered, neat and sturdy, with small bright polished leaves making a woodland blur across the diamond patterned mesh of white and green. There were other creepers in the square, but they hung in festoons, easily shabby, spoiled at their brightest by the thought of their stringy bare tendrils hung with shrivelled leaves. These small green leaves faded and dried and fell crisply, leaving a network of clean twigs to gleam in the rain, and the trellis bright green against the white house-front, suggesting summer all the year around.
She went eagerly towards this permanent summer created by wealth, warmed by the imagined voice of a power that could transform all difficulties, setting them in a beauty that lived by itself.
The little leaves, seen from the doorstep, shone like bright enamel in the misty twilight; but their beautiful wild clean-cut shapes, so near, suddenly seemed helpless, unable to escape, forced to drape the walls, life-fevered within, to which their stems were pinned. … But there was a coming in and out. … All people in houses had a coming in and out, those moments of coming, anew out into endless space. And everywhere at moments, in houses, was the sense of the life of the whole world