Not yet arrived at the age of dissection, she postured in imitation furs, in the lane from Little Swaffham, at the corner where the main road passed to Bulford, on a winter afternoon. She moved in a world of sense, the numb and grudging winter landscape that could not mould her to its cast of feature, on which her eye rested with pleasure, because beyond it she supplied details of her own. The tree with its sawing branches, the field with its conical mounds of dung dissolved gently in the mind of Kitty Goose. Beyond this, outline was a myth, gesture mechanical. She put up a hand to touch her hair, where it was combed up into its knot, straying in spite of this, into the air, against her hat, a strand advancing across her cheek as far as the corner of her mouth. I shall arrive, she felt, looking a fright. Her mouth tightened on this possibility. A sudden thudding of the heart, an enclosure of the winter landscape, the bark and stone. With her foot she kicked at a stone, lodged firmly in a patch of ice. Sunday, he said, they’re not monsters, he said, and sooner or later – you must. Sooner or later he would come. If this was the Sunday. If she could hope that this was not the Sunday. If she could retreat behind the week. A small, bright bird offered a cynical eye from the hedge.

All the irritating details of her life conspired to meet her at just this moment. She felt very stupid, numb, extravagant in imitation furs. All her life, she had to admit, she had fumbled awkwardly, her mind groping in a maze of word and action. She heard her own giggle against the voices of parties. She felt her cheek blush for the arguments she had floundered in and lost. Kicking an unimpressed stone with her foot, she was above all a flounderer, this Kitty Goose, this irrelevant figure in a winter landscape. You’re not unintelligent, Kitty; it’s time you thought to do something, Father said. He said it between mouthfuls of tea, giving it some thought, as if considering the possibilities of an individual. And she had accepted this, her potentialities as an individual, her intelligence, even pouting a little at what she thought was underestimation on her father’s part. After all, she had read, or sat with many books. She had read Bernard Shaw. She knew what to say about Ibsen. Before an onslaught of November wind blew the hair adrift at the nape of her neck. Yes, it’s time you thought to do something, he said. This again was before Little Swaffham. And now she had been there a year. Every morning she went to the school. She sat upright at her official table, she folded her hands among the copy-books, and smiled the kind of smile you smiled for small expectant village children whose noses ran. Humanity in the abstract was one thing. But the cold, running noses of small children, their stumpy hands, red and blue with the cold, and watering from chilblains, these froze the best intentions into the bright smile of condescending charity. Or sometimes it grew sweet, for she liked to win people, Kitty Goose, whether the eligible bank clerks of the S.A.L., or the small, snotty children of the elementary school at Little Swaffham. It gave her confidence.