as she sat there, relaxed and
motionless, she had in a way withdrawn herself from the struggle to
live. If she might only stay like this forever, without moving, without
thinking, without feeling, while she died slowly, inch by inch, spirit
and body.

A knock came at the door, and as she moved to answer it, she felt that
life returned in a slow throbbing agony, as if her blood were forced
back again into veins from which it had ebbed. When the tray was placed
on the table beside her, she looked up with a mild, impersonal curiosity
at the waiter, as the dead might look back from their freedom and
detachment on the unreal figures of the living. "I wonder what he thinks
about it all?" she thought vaguely, as she searched in her bag for his
tip. "I wonder if he sees how absurd and unnecessary all the things are
that he does day after day, year after year, like the rest of us? I
wonder if he ever revolts with this unspeakable weariness from waiting
on other people and watching them eat?" But the waiter, with his long
sallow face, his inscrutable eyes, and his general air of having
petrified under the surface, was as enigmatical as life.

After he had gone out, she rose from her untasted luncheon, and going
into her bedroom, took the black brocaded gown off the hanger and
stuffed the sleeves with tissue paper as carefully as if the world had
not crumbled around her. Then she packed away her wrapper and her
bedroom slippers and shook out and folded the dresses she had not worn.
For a time she worked on mechanically, hardly conscious of what she was
doing, hardly conscious even that she was alive. Then slowly, softly,
like a gentle rain, her tears fell into the trunk, on each separate
garment as she smoothed it and laid it away.

At half-past eight o'clock she was waiting with her hat and coat on when
Oliver came in, followed by the porter who was to take down her bags.
She knew that he had brought the man in order to avoid all possibility
of an emotional scene; and she could have smiled, had her spirit been
less wan and stricken, at this sign of a moral cowardice which was so
characteristic. It was his way, she understood now, though she did not
put the thought into words, to take what he wanted, escaping at the same
time the price which nature exacts of those who have not learned to
relinquish. Out of the strange colourless stillness which surrounded
her, some old words of Susan's floated back to her as if they were
spoke