A curious notion came to her that he did after allhear the things she could not say. He was an inscrut-able old man, with the yellow stain on his beard, andhis poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely througha world which satisfied all his wants, so that shethought he had only to put down his hand wherehe lay on the lawn to fish up anything he wanted.She looked at her picture. That would have been hisanswer, presumably — how ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but notwords, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the attics,she thought; it would be rolled up and flung undera sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it wastrue. One might say, even of this scrawl, not of thatactual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted,that it ‘remained for ever’, she was going to say, or,for the words spoken sounded even to herself, tooboastful, to hint, wordlessly; when, looking at thepicture, she was surprised to find that she could notsee it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did notthink of tears at first) which, without disturbing thefirmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled downher cheeks. She had perfect control of herself — Ohyes! — in every other way. Was she crying then for208