As it turned out he might have sat thus, talking with his daughter, for another half-hour and then left the house to go away with Natalie, without any more drama, but that his wife, lying on the bed in the next room, heard her daughter's cry of love and it must have stirred something deeply buried away in her. She got silently off the bed and going to the door opened it softly. Then she stood leaning against the door-frame and listening as her husband talked. There was a look of hard terror in her eyes. Perhaps she wanted at that moment to kill the man who had for so long a time been her husband and did not do so only because the long years of inaction and submission to life had made it impossible for her to lift an arm to strike.

At any rate she stood in silence and one might have thought that she would at any moment fall to the floor, but she didn't. She waited and John Webster kept on talking. Now he was telling his daughter with a kind of devilish attention to details all the story of their marriage.

What had happened, at least in the man's version of the affair, was that, after having written one letter he could not stop and wrote another on the same evening and two more on the following day.

He kept on writing letters and what he himself thought was that the letter-writing had created within him a kind of furious passion of lying that, once started, couldn't be stopped. "I began something that has been going on and on in me all these years," he explained. "It is a trick one practises, this lying to oneself about oneself." It was evident his daughter did not follow him, although she tried. He was talking now of something she had not experienced, could not have experienced, that is to say, the hypnotic power of words. Already she had read books and had been tricked by words, but there was in her no realization of what had already been done to her. She was a young girl and as, often enough, there was nothing in the life about her that seemed exciting or interesting she was thankful for the life of words and books. It was true they left one quite blank, went out of the mind leaving no trace. Well, they were created out of a kind of dream world. One had to have lived, to have experienced much of life, before one could come to the realization that just beneath the surface of the ordinary everyday life about there was deep and moving drama always going on. Few come to realization of the poetry of the actual.

It was evident her father had come to some such realization. Now he was talking. He was opening doors for her. It was like travelling in an old town one had thought one knew, with a marvellously inspired guide. One went in and out of old houses, seeing things as they had never been seen before. All the things of everyday life, a picture on the wall, an old chair sitting by a table, the table itself at which a man one had always known, sat smoking a pipe.