Then the collision of the backs of brushes.

Yes, said Mrs Standish. I know.

Sometimes it was good to kiss, in just this way, that was out of the question with men, a lover, or even a son, that was absent also in the gesture of other women officially rubbing cheeks. Mrs Standish realized that she loved her daughter physically, the arms, the cheek, touched now, and that she derived a comfort from this. Even when the ultimate separateness of soul frightened her, she returned gratefully to the sympathy of touch. She wanted to close her eyes.

Yes, she said.

It was quieter in the street, the tune withdrawn. We are standing here like a group of statuary, probably looking stupid, she thought.

You’ve grown quite thin, Eden, she said.

It was the moment of implied release. Because, after all, the mystic must return to his original structure of flesh and bone.

Oh, said Eden. I didn’t think.

She frowned. It reminded Mrs Standish that this, this foreign country under the black fringe, was still delicate ground.

Well, perhaps not. I’ll tell Julia you’ll be down in a minute, she said.

The first days, which succeed the last days of school, are unhurried enough to wear a look of permanency. There are no more compartments, there are no days, there is just time, and this has a purely personal tinge, it is yours, it is at the same time infinite and governable. Treacherous also, Eden found. Because you have time to look at yourself. It was almost the first time Eden Standish had looked at herself critically, from all sides at once, which is quite different from sensing a mere self in a desperate, groping manner, between pauses in older people’s conversation, or after the lights are out. She had spent a great deal of time in darkness, subjected to this by a hand that reached for the light. Really this is a very subtle form of tyranny, she felt.

The forms of tyranny. Sometimes she thought along these lines in the bus, shut in by the flat, dimensionless faces you find in buses. She thought about the face of the woman in the cottage, that had emancipated itself somehow into a shape of its own; it was very clear and salient in her memory, and at the same time distance had given it a larger significance. It seemed as if the woman in the cottage had become the one live, permeating experience of the last few years, a flash of intuition beside the years of conventionally acquired knowledge.

Perhaps the important things only happened in a flash. In the space of a day, almost in the falling of a velour hat, you became a different person. You forgot the intermediate process, the chrysalis schoolgirl, out of which bursts the white, mysterious moth. She was very white, incalculable, under her dark hair. She had time to notice this too, could take an interest in her sharp face, in which the cheeks burnt red, in anger or excitement. She went about, and she began to paint her lips as she saw the others do, timidly at first, then forcing the lipstick down on her mouth, in a movement suggestive of both resentment and desire. In glance candid, she looked at the people that she saw. She was curious. She did not give much thought to the impression that she made, because she was not conscious of herself, except alone, when the mind, turning on itself, begins to ask, to criticize. Then she was a white, waiting body, standing in a mirror, in a distant striking of clocks.