There were times when she felt she possessed him most in absence. When he was away he was in all she did, and she had increasing certitude that he felt his life vitalized by her. Never a letter-writer before, he had acquired, unasked, the habit of writing to her constantly and at length. He wrote from London, from Paris, from New York, from Moscow – flowing letters like his speech, and interspersed with drawings of people and things that had caught his fancy. (As his wife hated travelling he generally made his journeys alone). His hand-writing came to affect Joanna like his bodily presence, made her tremble through her being when her eye lighted upon it. And in return she filled her letters to him with spontaneous but not wholly artless glamour. She knew so well these days how to pique and interest him that it cost her no effort, was indeed a keen excitement and enjoyment.

This then was their solution for the time. From their two years as lovers they emerged as two distinct and separate streams of existence. Momentarily they might and did flow as one. But they were never so much in unison as when they flowed apart, each sweeping outwards round a rich individual curve, each rushing in an opposite direction but ever onwards and ever with gathering impetus towards the next brief mingling.

V

Meanwhile life in La France Quadrant became every day more difficult. The business of housekeeping, even for so small a family, was too much now for Juley. She went weighed down with it, and people in the streets looked askance at her unslept face and dragging gait. She had her being in a cruel trough of muddle, released only when sleep overcame her, or when she could pray aloud with a companion, and so keep sleep at bay while she cried for succour. But she was vigorous still. She could not live in the house and see herself superseded by a daughter. At the utmost she would apportion only certain vague duties to Joanna; and even here she was continually changing and fault-finding. At odd times, exasperating to one with work of her own to consider, she would make desperate appeals for daughterly help. Yet if Joanna tried unobtrusively to take some of the burden off her weary, indomitable shoulders, she was apt to resent it. A “companion” she would not hear of. “Treating me like a child or an idiot in my own house!” she exclaimed at the bare suggestion, and she would repeat the saying common with her “better to wear out, than rust out.”

Both the remaining children knew that a change in their way of living would have to be made, and made soon. But what change? And how bring it about? In the frequent debates between them and their mother each was prompted by a secret, personal desire, and these desires were in conflict. Linnet longed to be in rooms of his own: Joanna was heading for London: Juley did not know what she wanted. Pierced as she was by the knowledge that her children wished to be gone from her, she yet clung to the familiar. She fought against any acknowledgment that it was failing her at every point.