But the first cry had brought Baines out of the best spare bedroom and he moved quicker than Mrs Baines. She hadn’t reached the top of the stairs before he’d caught her round the waist. She drove her black cotton gloves at his face and he bit her hand. He hadn’t time to think, he fought her savagely like a stranger, but she fought back with knowledgeable hate. She was going to teach them all and it didn’t really matter whom she began with; they had all deceived her; but the old image in the glass was by her side, telling her she must be dignified, she wasn’t young enough to yield her dignity; she could beat his face, but she mustn’t bite; she could push, but she mustn’t kick.

Age and dust and nothing to hope for were her handicaps. She went over the banisters in a flurry of black clothes and fell into the hall; she lay before the front door like a sack of coals which should have gone down the area into the basement. Philip saw; Emmy saw; she sat down suddenly in the doorway of the best spare bedroom with her eyes open as if she were too tired to stand any longer. Baines went slowly down into the hall.

It wasn’t hard for Philip to escape; they’d forgotten him completely; he went down the back, the servants’ stairs, because Mrs Baines was in the hall; he didn’t understand what she was doing lying there; like the startling pictures in a book no one had read to him, the things he didn’t understand terrified him. The whole house had been turned over to the grown-up world; he wasn’t safe in the night-nursery; their passions had flooded it. The only thing he could do was to get away, by the back stairs, and up through the area, and never come back. You didn’t think of the cold, of the need of food and sleep; for an hour it would seem quite possible to escape from people for ever.