He raised shocked eyes she was not the sort of person to make jokes like this! Then he chose to laugh: a pinkish wet slit appeared across his white crinkled face; his eyes positively begged her to laugh, otherwise he might lose some money. She remained grave, looking at him. stopped laughing and said: "You want to go up now?" returning to the familiarity, the comradeship, of the country where no questions are asked, on which (and he knew it) she depended completely She went up to sit in her wicker chair. But it was not the same. Her husband had searched her out. (The world had searched her out.) The pressures were on her. She was here with his connivance. He might walk in at any moment, here, into Room 19. She imagined the report from the detective agency A woman calling herself Mrs. Jones, fitting the description of your wife (et cetera, et cetera, et cetera), stays alone all day in Room No. 19. She insists on this room, waits for it if it is en- gaged. As far as the proprietor knows, she receives no visitors there, male or female." A report something on these lines must have received. Well, of course he was right: things couldn't go on like this He had put an end to it all simply by sending the detective after She tried to shrink herself back into the shelter of the room,
snail pecked out of its shell and trying to squirm back. But the peace of the room had gone. She was trying conscio to revive it, trying to let go into the dark creative trance (or whatever it was) that she had found there. It was no use she craved for it, she was as ill as a suddenly deprived ad Several times she returned to the room, to look for hers there, but instead she found the unnamed spirit of restlessness, a pricking fevered hunger for movement, an irritable self-con- sciousness that made her brain feel as if it had coloured lights going on and off inside it. Instead of the soft dark that had been air, were now waiting for her demons that made her dash blindly about, muttering words of hate; she was impelling herself from point to point like a moth dashing itself against a windowpane, sliding to the bottom, fluttering off on broken wings, then crashing into the invisible barrier again. And again and again. Soon she was exhausted, and she told Fred that for a while she would not be needing the room, she was going on holiday. Home she went, to the big white house by the river The middle of a weekday, and she felt guilty at returning to her own home when not expected. She stood unseen, looking in at the kitchen window. Mrs. Parkes, wearing a discarded foral overall of Susan's, was stooping to slide something into the oven Sophie, arms folded, was leaning her back against a cupboard and laughing at some joke made by a girl not seen before by Susan a dark foreign girl, Sophie's visitor. In an armchair Molly, one of the twins, lay curled, sucking her thumb and watching the grownups. She must have some sickness, to be kept from school. The child's listless face, the dark circles under her eyes, hurt Susan Molly was looking at the three grownups working and talking in exactly the same way Susan looked at the four through the kitchen window: she was remote, shut off from them. But then, just as Susan imagined herself going in, picking up the little girl, and sitting in an armchair with her, stroking her probably heated forehead, Sophie did just that: she had been standing on one leg, the other knee flexed, its foot set against the wall. Now she let her foot in its ribbon-tied red shoe slide down the wall, stood solid on two feet, clapping her hands be- fore and behind her, and sang a couple of lines in German, so that the child lifted her heavy eyes at her and began to smile