When she had eaten, she lay down again and began to be aware of the room. There were bookcases facing her bed, all the way up to the ceiling. She decided that there was nothing worse than to be sick in bed with a room full of books; the titles marched back and forth before her eyes. Her attention was repeatedly arrested by the same combinations of color and lettering, or by a design on a book’s spine. Hazlitt, Mallarmé, and twenty volumes of Balzac; Dryden and Robert Graves; Cicero and Darwin, and, between them, a brand-new copy of By Love Possessed. She closed her eyes, but the cryptic messages, vertical and horizontal, went on transmitting themselves under her eyelids.

She could hear, outside, the faint sound of the plow in the nearby fields. Charlotte was moving the furniture in the living room; one of the accredited mechanics called out from the kitchen. In a little while, there was the ring of the postman’s bicycle bell, and the sound of the front door being opened and closed. (Elizabeth was too tired to be interested.) Everything goes on and on, she thought, and did not know whether this reassured or isolated her. It was not, of course, to say that only she had been excluded from the current of life; perhaps others merely conducted themselves better in their exclusion—Charlotte, the mechanics, Greta. Besides, she reminded herself, it’s not even as though I were actually suffering; it is only this apprehension that troubles me—the uneasiness I brought down from the mountain.

In the afternoon, she got up and took a bath. The sun had come out, and she lay in a chair on the terrace, wrapped up in a woolen dressing gown of Cyril’s and covered with a blanket, because the breeze blowing from the mountains was unexpectedly cool. The sun, too, was not quite so strong, and on the farther shore of the lake—less luxuriantly green today—the neat, opulent villas were slightly veiled. The dog, Aurélien, chased the smaller birds up and down the new lawn, and fled from the larger ones. From time to time, Greta came out of the house to see how Elizabeth was, and once she brought her sewing and sat beside her for a while. They said very little. Greta sat peacefully sewing, occasionally calling the dog away from the birds, or glancing up to smile at Elizabeth. Elizabeth felt bored with her own self-centeredness; she did not know how to stop studying her moods, or even to divert attention from them.

“I must go soon,” she said.

“Yes, it’s getting colder,” Greta said. “I’ll just finish this and we’ll go in.”

“I mean to America.”