No! If the children, born and unborn were to be served fairly, one must utter clearly and fearlessly one’s own word of truth in one’s own lifetime. And against this utterance, hard enough in itself the whole world was combined in the most tyrannical of all combinations, the combination of the past with the future generation. What a plausible and cruel trick was there!

It gagged one (yes, that was the right shade of blue for a sash), stifling, if it could, even the word of failure. For failure might be one’s word. All could not blossom. But all could reject the greater disaster of unacknowledgment. And this was what Georgie with her light talk of failure would not do. She would sooner deny meaning to their mother’s life than admit its failure. She would deny her own failure by child-bearing and the expedient of shifting her fulfilment from her personal hands to the impersonal hands of the future. And this she would call by the name of faith. All round her she shed easy enthusiastic denial, and Joanna shrank back forsaken and unsheltered. Such enthusiasm only increased the menace she felt everywhere. By the time Sholto’s new sash was measured and cut her disbelief in that fair hope by which she had lately been living was complete. It was finished and hard in the darkness – a jewel of unfaith.

They left the shop. And as they walked, hugging their parcels, from Piccadilly Circus to their station in Leicester Square, she looked with strange, terror-stricken eyes at the faces of the passing people. There were the satisfied, solid ones, the flighty, knowing ones, the benevolent, the wicked, the careless, the merely anxious. How they had impressed her once, taken as a whole: and never so much as when her own course was most erratic! Once she had believed that somehow, between them all, they possessed human truth and knowledge. To-day, for the first time she saw them as a flock of blind things, each one trusting implicitly, as she had done, in the corporate wisdom of all the other blind ones … Louis blind … her mother blind … the sadness of it almost killed her …

“Isn’t life too gorgeous, … too wonderful …?” exclaimed Georgie, breaking in upon her thoughts at that instant. And in her exaltation Georgie shouted, so that people turned their heads – some smiling indulgently, some with contempt, others with a peculiar frown of anger … “And I feel the whole time that darling Father and Mother, united now, are watching over us, rejoicing so lovingly over the progress of the next generation. Don’t you, Joey dear?”