Before the indifferent garden deities;

VI

IN the semi-darkness of the room, as the man talked to his daughter trying to make her understand an intangible thing, the woman who had been his wife for so many years and out of whose body had come the younger woman who now sat close to her husband, began also to try to understand. After a time, and being unable to stand longer, she managed, without attracting the attention of the others, to slip to the floor. She let her back slip down along the frame of the door and her legs turned sideways under her heavy body. In the position into which she had got she was uncomfortable and her knees hurt, but she did not mind. There was in fact a kind of satisfaction to be got from physical discomfort.

One had lived for so many years in a world that was now and before one's very eyes being destroyed. There was something wicked and ungodly in this business of defining life too sharply. Certain things should not be spoken of. One moved dimly through a dim world not asking too many questions. If there was death in silence, then one accepted death. What was the use of denial? One's body got old and heavy. When one sat on the floor the knees hurt. There was something unbearable in this notion that a man, with whom one had lived so many years of life and whom one had accepted quite definitely as a part of the machinery of life, should suddenly become something else, should become this terrible questioner, this raker-up of forgotten things.

If one lived behind a wall one preferred life behind the wall. Behind the wall the light was dim and did not hurt the eyes. Memories were shut out. The sounds of life grew faint and indistinct in the distance. There was something barbaric and savage in all this business of breaking down walls, making cracks and gaps in the wall of life.

There was a struggle going on within the woman, Mary Webster, also. A queer sort of new life came and went in her eyes. Had a fourth person at that moment come into the room he might have been more conscious of her than of the others.

There was something terrible in the way her husband John Webster had set the stage for the battle that was now to go on within her. The man was after all a dramatist. The business of buying the picture of the Virgin and the candles, the making of this little stage upon which a drama was to be played out; there was an unconscious art expression in all this.

Perhaps he had outwardly intended nothing of the sort, but with what devilish certainty he had worked. The woman now sat in a half-darkness on the floor. Between her and the burning candles was the bed on which the two others sat, one talking, the other listening. All the floor of the room, near where she sat was in heavy black shadows. She had put one hand out against the door frame to help support herself.