MENAGE,' he said.

'Yes. We aren't really at home to visitors,' said Winifred.

'You're not? Then I'm an intruder?'

For once he felt his conventional dress was out of place, he was an
outsider.

Gudrun was very quiet. She did not feel drawn to talk to him. At this
stage, silence was best--or mere light words. It was best to leave
serious things aside. So they talked gaily and lightly, till they heard
the man below lead out the horse, and call it to 'back-back!' into the
dog-cart that was to take Gudrun home. So she put on her things, and
shook hands with Gerald, without once meeting his eyes. And she was
gone.

The funeral was detestable. Afterwards, at the tea-table, the daughters
kept saying--'He was a good father to us--the best father in the
world'--or else--'We shan't easily find another man as good as father
was.'

Gerald acquiesced in all this. It was the right conventional attitude,
and, as far as the world went, he believed in the conventions. He took
it as a matter of course. But Winifred hated everything, and hid in the
studio, and cried her heart out, and wished Gudrun would come.

Luckily everybody was going away. The Criches never stayed long at
home. By dinner-time, Gerald was left quite alone. Even Winifred was
carried off to London, for a few days with her sister Laura.

But when Gerald was really left alone, he could not bear it. One day
passed by, and another. And all the time he was like a man hung in
chains over the edge of an abyss. Struggle as he might, he could not
turn himself to the solid earth, he could not get footing. He was
suspended on the edge of a void, writhing. Whatever he thought of, was
the abyss--whether it were friends or strangers, or work or play, it
all showed him only the same bottomless void, in which his heart swung
perishing. There was no escape, there was nothing to grasp hold of. He
must writhe on the edge of the chasm, suspended in chains of invisible
physical life.

At first he was quiet, he kept still, expecting the extremity to pass
away, expecting to find himself released into the world of the living,
after this extremity of penance. But it did not pass, and a crisis
gained upon him.

As the evening of the third day came on, his heart rang with fear. He
could not bear another night. Another night was coming on, for another
night he was to be suspended in chain of physical life, over the
bottomless pit of nothingness. And he could not bear it. He could no