ge. She wept over the
rupture, yet what was the good of making it up! Good or not good, she
could not go to them. So her things had been left behind and she and
Gudrun were to walk over for them, in the afternoon.

It was a wintry afternoon, with red in the sky, when they arrived at
the house. The windows were dark and blank, already the place was
frightening. A stark, void entrance-hall struck a chill to the hearts
of the girls.

'I don't believe I dare have come in alone,' said Ursula. 'It frightens
me.'

'Ursula!' cried Gudrun. 'Isn't it amazing! Can you believe you lived in
this place and never felt it? How I lived here a day without dying of
terror, I cannot conceive!'

They looked in the big dining-room. It was a good-sized room, but now a
cell would have been lovelier. The large bay windows were naked, the
floor was stripped, and a border of dark polish went round the tract of
pale boarding.

In the faded wallpaper were dark patches where furniture had stood,
where pictures had hung. The sense of walls, dry, thin, flimsy-seeming
walls, and a flimsy flooring, pale with its artificial black edges, was
neutralising to the mind. Everything was null to the senses, there was
enclosure without substance, for the walls were dry and papery. Where
were they standing, on earth, or suspended in some cardboard box? In
the hearth was burnt paper, and scraps of half-burnt paper.

'Imagine that we passed our days here!' said Ursula.

'I know,' cried Gudrun. 'It is too appalling. What must we be like, if
we are the contents of THIS!'

'Vile!' said Ursula. 'It really is.'

And she recognised half-burnt covers of 'Vogue'--half-burnt
representations of women in gowns--lying under the grate.

They went to the drawing-room. Another piece of shut-in air; without
weight or substance, only a sense of intolerable papery imprisonment in
nothingness. The kitchen did look more substantial, because of the
red-tiled floor and the stove, but it was cold and horrid.

The two girls tramped hollowly up the bare stairs. Every sound reechoed
under their hearts. They tramped down the bare corridor. Against the
wall of Ursula's bedroom were her things--a trunk, a work-basket, some
books, loose coats, a hat-box, standing desolate in the universal
emptiness of the dusk.

'A cheerful sight, aren't they?' said Ursula, looking down at her
forsaken possessions.

'Very cheerful,' said Gudrun.

The two girls set to, carrying everything down