If John had happened along Eglinton Road at that moment he would have seen on his mother’s face the fierce, cruel expression that they had both always thought belonged on his father’s face. She looked capable of anything. She looked capable of murder, but she was only suffering what murderers suffer before they strike. But she would never strike. She was afraid. She thought it was pride that held her hand, but it was only fear. Fear and longing struggled for supremacy in her soul, but it was not their struggle against one another and against her that troubled her — it was her lifelong denial of herself, bolstered and fed as it was by fear. She longed to be near to someone, but there was no one who wanted her. She was sure of that. Nobody wanted her; it was her only certainty. It was bad that people turned their backs on her, but what was worse, worst of all, was that she saw no reason why they should not turn their backs on her. She was not surprised at the way her life had gone. She sat bewildered by her own judgment against herself, and unaware of it.

She felt cold. It was foolish to stay out in the air this time of year, this time of night. She put her hands inside the sleeves of her coat. She did not want to move just yet. She kept thinking that something wonderful might happen, and that if she stayed patiently where she was, somehow or another she would be able to get to where John was. If she fainted from the cold and from exposure, an ambulance would have to come and take her to the hospital, and if she was in there, sick in the hospital, surely they would see that there was great necessity for John to come home again.

She must have come this way, around this corner, thousands of times, and she looked curiously about, because she had almost never been here at night before. She looked at Sandford Road, where trams and cars and bicycles and people moved steadily, passing one another, and she gazed down Eglinton Road at all the lighted houses, as far as she could see. She seemed to be saluting what she looked at, but she was no longer thinking of where she was. She was thinking of the place where John was, and of the town where she had been brought up, and of the hospital that was not going to admit her, and she was seeing the future that had once lain before her, full of light, reflecting heaven, that was now opaque and blank like fear and reflected nothing.