After washing her hands, she hurried up the five top steps to the upper landing, where there were two doors opening into the front bedroom and into the smaller back room where the children slept. Both doors were closed, and instead of going into her own room, where her brush and comb were, she turned into the children’s room and went across and looked into the small framed mirror that stood on their chest of drawers. She began to smooth her hair with her hands, but her reflection was so lost and pale that it frightened her, and she put on the light to reassure herself. She bent forward to the mirror again and carefully pushed a loose strand into the neat bun at the back of her head, but as she moved, something moved with her, something much larger and even more silent than she was. Her shadow was on the wall to the side of the mirror and it was following her, and now it was bending with her, bending toward her, and she stared at it. The light in her own bedroom gave her no shadow that she had ever noticed. She paused and the shadow paused also, waiting for her as she waited for it. She looked closer and at that moment, as it bent its head, she knew what she was looking at. That was her mother’s shadow there on the wall. There was no mistake about it; that was her mother.

Mrs. Bagot could not understand it. She and her mother had not looked alike. But there it was, her mother’s shadow as she had often seen it — the thin line of the cheek, the indentation at the eye, the high curve of the forehead, and, above all, the little straying hairs that always escaped the brush to wave independently at the sides of her mother’s forehead and at the back of her neck. The little stray hairs were never more than the length of a straight pin, and there were only a few of them. Mrs. Bagot thought she recognized every one of them, there in the shadow. She thought that if she put out her hand she would surely feel that hair again. She put out the light and then put it on again at once. There again was the neat, bent head, with the thin hairs making a frail pattern on the wall, a frail pattern that was more real at this moment than the pattern on the wallpaper, as the penciled rain in a Chinese watercolor is more real than the strong and enduring landscape that lies beyond. It is my mother, Mrs. Bagot thought; there she is, how patient she is.

She sighed once and smiled at herself without looking at herself, and then she put out the light and went down to the kitchen, where she found the kettle boiling furiously.