She was feeling tired and unhappy, depressed by the chilly autumn dusk over Enbury Fields and the clanging of the trams and the tiny squalid shops with their humble lights, the display of tinned food, and the drab people who hurried in like gnomes to buy.

She saw the shadow of the economic claw lying across the world, slowly contracting and relaxing, and there seemed no regal power or proud beauty left; only odd goblins, pathetic gleams of prettiness, humble little cosinesses which people made for themselves in the shadow of the claw, and the courage of their ironic laughter. And she was very miserable about her brothers.

She bought her bread in the dairy, and stepped outside into the twilight, lingering a moment to look in the window of a dirty, feebly lit secondhand shop which was full of small junk; chipped vases, paste combs with stones missing, soiled books, broken strings of beads.

And suddenly the sky above the dim, dirty street seemed to grow as blue as deep water, and the long superb line of the Wrenwood beech trees, which hung on the horizon at the end of the street, seemed to grow until it filled all heaven with murmuring shade and beauty.

In the middle of the dirty window she saw the painting she called ‘Nydia’, which Mrs North had bought from the sale at the surgery six months ago.

There she was, in her dress the colour of yellow roses bordered with the red key pattern, her dark eyes looking a little beyond Sophia’s gaze, holding out her apple of tranquil wisdom for the tired world to eat.

‘Nydia,’ muttered Sophia. ‘It can’t be true.’

But it was. There was even a white scratch in one corner of the painting; it seemed that Nydia, like Sophia, had been roughly handled.

Sophia went into the shop.

The man who came out of a den at the back saw by the young lady’s look that she had taken a fancy to the picture, and he had the sense, in spite of being newly roused from a frowsy sleep, to ask five shillings for it, which he got.

But the young lady reached over and took the picture out of the middle of the window, and was off before he could say, that on second thoughts it was a nice little thing and worth seven and sixpence. Taking it out of the window like that – he never see such a thing. He was half a mind to go after her, but he was still sleepy, so he went back to the den instead.

Sophia went home with the bread in one hand and Nydia in the other. She could not believe that she had got her. She stared and stared at her, and her head chimed with memories of beautiful places and things that she had seen, and she thought of the poems she hoped to write, and the tram came to anchor at the edge of Enbury Heath.