that they can offer one nothing else.

'Shortlands!--Heavens! Think of living there, one week, then the next,
and THEN THE THIRD--'

'No, I won't think of it--it is too much.'

And she broke off, really terrified, really unable to bear any more.

The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day
following day, AD INFINITUM, was one of the things that made her heart
palpitate with a real approach of madness. The terrible bondage of this
tick-tack of time, this twitching of the hands of the clock, this
eternal repetition of hours and days--oh God, it was too awful to
contemplate. And there was no escape from it, no escape.

She almost wished Gerald were with her to save her from the terror of
her own thoughts. Oh, how she suffered, lying there alone, confronted
by the terrible clock, with its eternal tick-tack. All life, all life
resolved itself into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the
striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching
of the clock-fingers.

Gerald could not save her from it. He, his body, his motion, his
life--it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a
horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours. What
were his kisses, his embraces. She could hear their tick-tack,
tick-tack.

Ha--ha--she laughed to herself, so frightened that she was trying to
laugh it off--ha--ha, how maddening it was, to be sure, to be sure!

Then, with a fleeting self-conscious motion, she wondered if she would
be very much surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her
hair had turned white. She had FELT it turning white so often, under
the intolerable burden of her thoughts, und her sensations. Yet there
it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a
picture of health.

Perhaps she was healthy. Perhaps it was only her unabateable health
that left her so exposed to the truth. If she were sickly she would
have her illusions, imaginations. As it was, there was no escape. She
must always see and know and never escape. She could never escape.
There she was, placed before the clock-face of life. And if she turned
round as in a railway station, to look at the bookstall, still she
could see, with her very spine, she could see the clock, always the
great white clock-face. In vain she fluttered the leaves of books, or
made statuettes in clay. She knew she was not REALLY reading. She was
not REALLY working. She was wa