O this is terrible. At last after all these months. I have found perfection, have fallen into a beautiful chair, have sat throned yet at peace, doesn’t the girl know what is the matter with me? O this is too much, too much. The run over in the great car, the warm rug about my feet, the feeling of the world coming back, yes the “world,” houses with carpets on stairs, windows with curtains drawn, wine in different shaped glasses, stems of glasses in a circle on white damask and flowers in the centre of the table, made artificial by the stiff upright symmetry of them. Flowers on tables and curtains drawn and the right side of the right person at the right dinner at Delia Prescott’s, all those things came back when I sank in this chair, smelt the translucent fumes of tea that was real tea, tea a ceremony, Chinese. . what was it? All that had come to Hermione in her corner of the room, in her great chair and now all that was going. Didn’t the girl understand? No, it would be like Marion, wrong kind of delicacy, never to have told her about the baby and after all, here is this child, perhaps she knows nothing at all. O impossible! Yet staring back into eyes that stared and stared (now that she was just leaving) Hermione asked herself if perhaps she wasn’t in some net of wrong enchantment, must pay, it seems for everything, but this was too much to pay for beauty and seclusion and the trees going past the open car window all in proportion. Paintable. Things seen in perspective become things to be grappled with. Art. Isn’t art just re-adjusting nature to some intellectual focus? The things are there all the time, but art, a Chinese bowl, a Chinese idol, a brass candle-stick make a focus, a sense of proportion like turning the little wheel of an opera glass, getting a great mass of inchoate colour and form into focus, focussing on one small aspect of life though really it is only a tiny circle, a tiny circle. You get life into a tiny circle by art and that was where Morgan le Fay was wrong with her craft for she would say all art is man’s mere imagining and see, the shell by the shore, the one petal of a water-lily is a sort of crystal glass, a bright surface and you yourself staring at it, may make things in the air, pictures, images, things beyond beauty beautiful. But there is where Morgan le Fay was wrong. We are strung together, we all have lungs, must breathe, breathe, breathe, we men and gods, rather we men and demi-gods for Morgan le Fay and Circe and Cassandra and the Oreads and Hermione were only half-people, half gods, demi-divinities like this child whom now half-god Hermione saw was also one of the half-people. O what good did motor cars do anyway and having Tiberius for a father if you had to stare this way? Now sinking back in her chair having almost said good-bye, Hermione must ask her.
“What is it in your eyes. I’m awfully sorry (will the man mind waiting another ten minutes?). I can’t go home all alone without knowing. You will I am sure forgive me. I want to know what it is in your eyes for they have looked at me and looked at me, seeming to want to tear something out of me like evil-minded urchin opening up a chrysalis to see the unborn butterfly. I am sorry if I have been uncomprehending. It’s true you wrote me you were lonely. I have forgotten for a long time the meaning of that word for I am — I am—” but she couldn’t tell her that. It occurred to Hermione suddenly that the child might hate her, turn against her, consider her beyond the pale, a woman with a fine leashed intellect (for the child adored the intellect) having so far forsaken the snow-white arcana of Pallas, so far as to fall. . fall. . fall. . there were other islands. She wanted to tell the child about those other islands. “There are other haunts, not of the intellect.” The child said simply staring with the eyes that weren’t now blue at all, gone grey as if a film of ice lay with devastating blight across a space of blue and heaven-blue gentians. That was the trouble, that was what unnerved. The eyes were glazed over like the eyes of the blind. There was something odd, unseemly, difficult. Hermione wanted to get out, get away, hold on to her web of gauze, continue the melting loveliness into her own room, take it back with her to spread it like thin honey over the plain wheat-bread of her plain days. She wanted to eat the gauze with her spirit, make it her own, take it back, treasure it and let flecks of it brighten days and days. . for days after all were days and sometimes drawing the water from the little well, wandering up to the distant farm for her supplies, waiting at the post office for her notes from Darrington (Darrington was writing, writing to her) she felt days as days. . heavy lead-winged days that had to be endured for at the end of days and days there were worse days. . worse days. . days of fire and slaughter. . madness, no, she daren’t think, had morganlefayed it, made herself a dream in a dream to sustain herself, to sustain the small le Fay. What was this staring at her? Was it another child, child of her mind, her spirit? Did God increase his burden. . to him that hath. . shall be given. . but she didn’t want this mad child vamping her. She couldn’t stand perils of the intellect. She wanted to escape the mind and all it stood for. She wanted to take from this girl not give to her. “I know. I suppose you wanted to paint. It was like that with me — only music—” What was she going to say, where was it going to take her? “I shouldn’t think too much, wait a little — wait a little—” The girl said surprisingly yet not to Hermione at all surprisingly, “I can’t wait much longer. I’ve thought it all out. I can’t have what I want, paint, the smell of it, boxes of paints, freedom — I’m going to kill myself — it isn’t exactly anybody’s fault — but I can’t stand it.” “Can’t stand — what?” “Everything. Nothing. All things. Nothing at all. Myself chiefly.”