movement in an accessible world, all turned to dangerous weapons in wrong hands by the unfinished, insensitive mouths, the ugly slur in the speech, the shapelessness of bearing, the naively visible thoughts, circumscribed by business, the illustrated monthly magazines, the summer month at the seaside; their lives were exactly like their way of walking down the street, a confident blind trampling. Speech was not needed to reveal their certainties; they shed certainty from every angle of their unfinished persons. Certainty about everything. Incredulous contempt for all uncertainty. Impatient contempt for all who could not stand up for themselves. Cheerful uncritical affection for each other. And for all who were living or trying to live just as they did … The little bushes of variegated laurel grouped in railed-off oblongs along the gravelled pathway between the two wide strips of pavement, drew her gaze. They shone crisply, their yellow and green enamel washed clean by yesterday’s rain. She hurried along feeling out towards them through downcast eyes. They glinted back at her unsunned by the sunlight, rootless sapless surfaces set in repellent clay, spread out in meaningless air. To and fro her eyes slid upon the varnished leaves … she saw them in a park set in amongst massed dark evergreens, gleaming out through afternoon mist, keeping the last of the light as the people drifted away leaving the slopes and vistas clear … grey avenues and dewy slopes drifted before her in the faint light of dawn, the grey growing pale and paler; the dew turned to a scatter of jewels and the sky soared up high above the growing shimmer of sunlit green and gold. Isolated morning figures hurried across the park, aware of its morning freshness, seeing it as their own secret garden, part of their secret day. …
From the sunlit white façade of a large London house the laurels looked down through a white stone-pillared balustrade. They appeared coming suddenly with the light of a street lamp, clumped safely behind the railings of a Bloomsbury square … the opening of a side street led her back into the maze of little roads. The protective presence of the little house was there and she sauntered happily along through channels of sheltered sunlit silence. …