IV

sideboard and the lower part of the long mirror between the windows where the midmost piece of copper gleamed in reflection. She stood still, holding the warm air in her nostrils, everything was blotted out and then restored to its place⁠ ⁠… what place, why was it good, what was she trying to remember?⁠ ⁠… In the familiar firelit winter darkness was a faint dry warm scent⁠ ⁠… mimosa. It was a repetition.⁠ ⁠… It had been there last year, suddenly; drily fragrant in the winter darkness of the warm room preparing for the light and warmth of the evening. It had seemed then like some wealthy extravagance, bringing a sense of the freedom of wealth to have things out of season, and a keen sudden memory in the dark London room of the unspoken inexpressible beauty of Newlands⁠ ⁠… its soft-toned softly carpeted and curtained effect, fragrant with clusters of winter flowers, standing complete somewhere in the secret black spaces of her mind.⁠ ⁠… But now here it was again, just at the same moment, just before the winter darkness began to give way. Perhaps mimosa came at this time of year suddenly in the shops, before the spring flowers, and careful people like Mrs. Orly could buy it⁠ ⁠… then in London mimosa was the sign of spring . It was like the powdery fragrance of a clear warm midsummer evening, like petal-dust; pollen-dust; the whole summer circling in the glow of firelight. Then Eve would not come this winter. The darkest secret wintertime of London was over again. It would come again in single moments and groups of days, but its time was gone. The moment of realisation of spring had come by surprise; there lay all the spring days ahead leading on to summer spread out for anyone to see, calling to Eve or to anyone who might have come into the room to whom one could have said doesn’t the smell of mimosa make you realise the winter is over; and here within, lit up as if by a suddenly switched on electric light was one’s own real realisation going back and back; in pictures that grew clearer, each time something happened that switched on a light within the black spaces of your mind. Things that no one could share, coming again and again just as some outside thing was beginning to interest you, as if to remind you that the inmost reality comes to you when you are alone.⁠ ⁠…