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(18)

one woman, too much, too much. She creaked, she moaned. She
banged the door. She turned the key in the lock, and left the
house alone, shut up, locked.

VIII

     The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left
like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that
life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the
trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths fumbling seemed to
have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed.
Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying
shawl sweung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the
tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing room;
the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovel
fulls; rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that
to gnaw behind the wainscots. Tortoise shell butterflies burst
.X | from the chrysalis, & pattered their life out on the window pane.
and died on the window panes. Poppies sowed themselves among
the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes
towered among roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the
cabbages; while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had
become, on winters' nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and
thorned briars which made the whole room green in summer.
     What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility
of nature? Like a spot of sunlight Mrs. McNab's dream of a lady,
of a child, of a plate of milk soup,? ithad wavered3 over the walls

 


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