“She had letters to write.” Russell walked on down the path, nodding to his mother, who sat, sewing buttons on a shirt, in a cane chair beside James. James’s effrontery, the ineptitude of Miranda now ceased to interest him. He walked along the flagged path, onto which the flood tide of his mother’s flowers had overflowed, fully engaged in maintaining his own equilibrium. This required an effort so intense that it became, at times, almost, physical and he walked like a person under a strong sedative, slightly stupefied, his body braced against the return of pain. In so far as he noticed at all, he saw only a threat in the brilliant delicacy of the flowers, the smooth sweep of grass, and the light shredded through trees and shrubs at the end of the path. These were things—unlike his relations with Miranda, or his inability to work, which were matters inextricably entangled with his life—offered gratuitously by fate to impede his struggle for sanity. He felt that if he did not soon reach a place of shelter and darkness he would have to turn and go back inside. He crossed the foot of the lawn and pushed his way into a small wood with the instinctive haste of someone who, at the point of suffocation, seeks fresh air.

“This seems to be one of Russell’s bad days,” remarked Constance, looking troubled.

“I can’t make out what’s wrong with him,” James said.

“He’s just dreadfully depressed, dear. He feels we’re all doomed—which is, after all, no more than the truth, though one can’t afford to give it undivided attention. These things happen to people—they say he will get over it. It’s as though the Life Force has been temporarily cut off.”

“You make it sound like part of the utilities. In the meantime, how awful for Miranda.”

Constance’s frown deepened. “Well, my dear, she must take the rough with the smooth, as the marriage service says.” After this somewhat loose quotation, she paused to examine the rest of the buttons on the shirt, and attacked one with her needle. “Marriage is like democracy—it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with.… Given the best of circumstances, it’s exceedingly difficult. I suppose, if Dan had lived”—Dan was Constance’s husband—“we would have had our difficulties too.” Constance only said this to make her point: nothing would have made her believe, particularly in retrospect, that she and Daniel might ever have quarreled.

“What will Miranda do with herself while he’s gone?”