Out on the landing he looked up the short flight of stairs, five steps, that led to the two bedrooms. The doors were closed, and behind them Delia and the children lay sleeping, dreaming, far away in themselves, not thinking of him. Their sound sleep turned the house into a refuge, and Martin thought, If this night could only last a week, or two weeks, I might have time to get everything straightened out in my head, and then I would know what to do … If they would only sleep happily like that for a long time, he might find himself able to think again. But the coming of day, a few hours off, rose up in his mind like a towering wave that was all the more awful because it would be succeeded after twenty-four hours by another wave, and then by another. There was no end to the days ahead, and the ones farthest off, years from now, were gathering power while he stood waiting on the landing. It was a merciless prospect. There was no way out of this house, which now seemed to contain all of his future as well as a good part of his past.

And Delia knew nothing of this. She could never understand his suffering, even if he tried to speak to her about it. He was a lonely man. He had always been a lonely figure, more or less, but he was lonelier now than he had ever been. He was proud of his loneliness, and he understood it. He knew it was what set him apart. He was a solitary man, not an ordinary family man, not at all a domesticated sort of person. He believed his loneliness came from a deep source in his nature, and that it made him more sensitive than other men, and at the same time stronger — a visionary of a kind. He was hard to live with, perhaps, but Delia’s trouble was not that he was hard to live with but that she did not appreciate him. Delia had no understanding whatever of him, and never would have. He had given up hoping for understanding from her. On she went, on and on, “improving” the house and working in the garden and saving for a new piece of linoleum or a new set of curtains, wasting her time for the most part, and yet at this moment, standing on the landing, Martin felt more like himself than he had for a long time, and he felt not only patience for Delia but pity, because she was so blind and so weak, living along like a little mole, with no idea of what life might be like beyond these four flimsy, commonplace walls.