She had met Louis but once since their readjustment, and then only for a few minutes in the street. He too, as if in harmony with her, had taken to working harder and longer than before.

But their one meeting had been significant, full of understanding and tremulous concord. Desire had hovered and beckoned behind the flimsy mask of his attention as Joanna told Louis how she was placed in sole charge of all the arrangements at home: and while she was speaking his dumb appeal received its answer without need of words. He was smiling, she very grave as he read the steadfast promise in her eyes.

And both Mamie, who was her elder by five years, and Janet, who had been privileged to scold her not so long ago, obeyed her without question. They carried out her plans, which were surprisingly ingenious and practical, as if she were a proved general. In every one of her actions Louis was in some way involved, but now she would not think about him. Her imagination, was a falcon, hooded and chained till the appointed moment, but all her executive faculties were sharpened. She seemed to have eyes all round her head, to dwell upon a high watch-tower, to be able to think collectively of a dozen things at one time.

The state of the hidden places at Collessie Street was a fresh revelation to her of her mother’s cumbered life, and she became every hour more reckless in the work of simplification. She was sure that nine-tenths of the stuff they had housed all these years would be neither used nor missed by any member of the family. Fuller and fuller grew the old ash-pit in the back green. But Joanna had an inbred hatred of waste; and she would trudge up and down the long stairs fifty times a day with her arms full, while Mamie made her heaps into bundles and despatched them to this poor person or that charity. And at night, dazed with fatigue and satisfaction, she would stumble up to bed. When she lay down at first her thighs and the muscles of her back ached so acutely that she groaned aloud, but within five minutes she would be sleeping like a stone.

In the sacrilege of the wardrobe she would allow no one else to share.

As the great, curving, mirrored door swung heavily back upon its hinges Joanna was a child again; and the enclosure with its trays and drawers, and its middle place lined with faded blue box-pleating, appeared to her as the very ark of romance. But at the quick of her excitement was something which had nothing to do with memory or with childhood except in so far as it signified the departure from both. This, not the hour of her marriage with Mario, was the time of severance, the final breaking of the umbilical cord. Very slowly had she drawn apart from her mother. Even while she had thought herself detached she had really been held and harried. But now she was removing her entire being in an act of irreparable rebellion. And this was the symbol: this laying of her new, alien hands upon her mother’s treasures.