Tonight her head was very full. She had got through the work of the day in fits and starts, hurrying over some tasks, lingering over others, her fingers moving restlessly, as restlessly as the thoughts in her head, and sometimes spoiling her work so that she must start afresh. Her throat was full too, she found now, full of strange words that she dared not utter and had not thought ever to utter in her life before. Yet the words fought to come out.

How full her head was!

At the top of the stairs Alice Nimrod stopped and turned about. She had no business to be here, and a maid in a place she had no business to be was in a precarious position. She walked the short distance along the landing and paused at her mistress’s bedroom door, her hand raised to knock.

But she did not knock. Her hand fell to her side. She closed her eyes.

Inside the room rain lashed the window.

Eleanor Dunlevy looked up from her journal. It was already quite dark outside. The curtains had not yet been drawn, and in the window she saw only the darkness of the night and her own face made indistinct by the rivers of water on the pane. The face was very white in the strange light, and featureless, the eyes blank, obscured by the little round-framed spectacles that she had recently been obliged to adopt. Her husband, a man with his nose always in a newspaper or an official document of some description and who was five years her senior, did not require such aids to his vision. She pulled the spectacles off. They were attached to a little chain about her neck and she let them fall to her chest. She had not yet told her husband she wore them, spent her evenings staring unseeing at the blurred pages of her novel until he retired to bed.

Outside leaves swirled and stuck to the pane, held fast by the force of the wind before being swept away into oblivion, and now Eleanor could make out two bright points of light in the darkness, which she thought must be the distant pilot lights of some vessel negotiating the safety of the harbour, but they turned out to be the unblinking yellow eyes of a possum wrapped around a branch of the Moreton Bay fig outside her window.

She took up her spectacles and reviewed what she had written in her journal:

Blanche wore a feathered piece on her head, ostrich, one presumes—

Her eyes moved down the page.

… the turbot was a rather odd colour though no one remarked on it … R. made some fatuous observation about the Prem. that amused everyone—not A., of course, who cannot afford to mock the P.!