Every day of the six months that had passed since John left to become a priest, Mrs. Derdon realized that he was gone and that he was not coming back, and every day she thought she was only realizing it for the first time. The realization was alive and it possessed her completely and directed all her actions, one minute telling her to sit down and the next minute telling her to stand up immediately without delay and without reason — except that the power of the realization was reason enough, because it directed her every minute now, and controlled her and kept her going and gave its own mysterious organization to everything she did. If it had not been for this realization, keeping at her all day, she would not have known what to do next and she would have done what she really wanted to do, which was to crawl in under the bed and put her face down on the floor and sleep. She kept wanting to lie down on the floor. The realization that John was gone and would not be back took different shapes inside her, but it always stayed in the same place, just under her chest, in the center, between her ribs. Sometimes it went away altogether and she felt empty, and then, at these moments, she would go and get herself something to eat, but almost always when she had the food before her, the realization would come back again and she would feel sick at the thought of eating. At times the realization would go away altogether, or seem to go away, and she would become terribly excited and run to the front windows knowing that John was coming home, that he was at this exact moment walking along the street carrying his suitcase, and that she would have to wait only a minute or so to get her first sight of him, coming around the corner from the main road. But of course he wasn’t coming, and he wouldn’t be coming, and the excitement inside her would flatten out and stupefy her with its weight, and her disappointment and humiliation at being made a fool of would be as cruel as though what she had felt had really been hope and not what it was, the delirium of loss.

Out of this recurrent delirium two daydreams had grown, long, peaceful, pleasant dreams, always expanding, always increasing in their progress and in their detail, alike in only two respects — in their soothing monotony and in their endings. Both dreams ended at the moment when John became her own again, only hers.