ourselves little children, praying that God may keep us safe while we sleep. It is sweet to sing together, clasping hands, afraid of the dark, while Miss Curry plays the harmonium.’
‘The iron gates have rolled back,’ said Jinny. ‘Time’s fangs have ceased their devouring. We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket-handkerchiefs.’
‘I grasp, I hold fast,’ said Susan. ‘I hold firmly to this hand, anyone’s, with love, with hatred; it does not matter which.’
‘The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us,’ said Rhoda, ‘and we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent. Wren’s palace, like the quartet played to the dry and stranded people in the stalls, makes an oblong. A square is stood upon the oblong and we say, “This is our dwelling-place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left outside.”’
‘The flower,’ said Bernard, ‘the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.’
‘A mysterious illumination,’ said Louis, ‘visible against those yew trees.’
‘Built up with much pain, many strokes,’ said Jinny.
‘Marriage, death, travel, friendship,’ said Bernard; ‘town and country; children and all that; a many-sided substance cut out of this dark; a many-faceted flower. Let us stop for a moment; let us behold what we have made. Let it blaze against the yew trees. One life. There. It is over. Gone out.’
‘Now they vanish,’ said Louis. ‘Susan with Bernard. Neville with Jinny. You and I, Rhoda, stop for a moment by this stone urn. What song shall we hear now that these couples have sought the groves, and Jinny, pointing with her gloved hand, pretends to notice the water-lilies, and
