Yet actually she felt tremendously agitated, so nervous that she dared not look round. The apartment was full of presence, of intimation, of some silent communication. And suddenly she knew that what it communicated was absence. There was no one here. There had been no one here when Edward was alive. He had lain alone on the narrow bed unable to sleep (he had always suffered from insomnia even as a child). It was a dead house with a suffering, violently alive man locked in it, unable to get out, sitting in front of a wall. And all the lovely things, and their associations, the friendships they memorialized, the places, the times were there as if to plead against loneliness, to keep loneliness, separation, isolation at bay, as he himself held it rigidly away from him like a poison, flung himself into his work, made the careful notes in the volumes of poems early in the morning, or rushed off to a meeting of one of those suspect organizations where, she knew suddenly, he perhaps felt some communion, some temporary fugitive sense of common identity.

Why? That was the question she asked the wall. But walls have no answer and without knowing it, without being aware of what she was doing she looked around for a mirror. There was none. There was only the shadow of herself, Isabel Cavan, standing behind Isabel Ferrier. She had not come here so fearfully then to be confronted by Edward, or Edward’s life but by her own. The answer to the question was inextricably mixed up with other questions, and these other questions were what she had feared. “No man is an Iland.” Edward was not. Somewhere he was “attached to the Maine,” and in a flash of realization she saw the coffin, lurching in some freight car, but moving slowly towards its rest in the grave beside their mother. He might have been confused at the end about where and to whom to leave his money, but about this there had been no confusion. He had asked to be buried beside his mother. How could so much light hold so much darkness in it? For their mother, it seemed, had been a creature of the light. Isabel never thought of her without thinking of gardens, of sunlight on flowers, of the patient hands, rough from much gardening, transplanting seedlings or putting stakes in to hold up the falling chrysanthemums. She could not think of her without thinking of the way her eyes brimmed with light—there was no other word, very large blue eyes that sometimes looked gray and sometimes deep blue, it depended on the time of day, on what she was wearing. And she could not think of her without the acute memory of the high tension, the strain of wild poetry in her which even marriage to their father had not subdued.