h of her habitual pretence,
which never took him in for an instant and which she kept up perhaps for
that very reason, that she did not care when she saw him again.

"Oh, God, she must be going through it!" he muttered. He could see her
as she would be at this hour, sitting at the wide window in her room,
which she kept uncurtained so that the Thames estuary and the silver
fingers it thrust into the marshes should lie under her eye like a map.
Her nightlong contest with memory would not have destroyed her air of
power nor wiped from her lips and eyes that appearance of having just
finished smiling at a joke that was not quite good enough to prolong her
merriment, but being quite ready to smile at another; it would only have
made her rather ugly. Her hair would be straight and greasy, her skin
leaden, the flesh of her face heavy except when something in the scene
she looked on invoked that expression which he could not bear. Her face
would become girlish and alive, and after one moment of forgetfulness
would settle into a mask of despair. Something on the marshes had
reminded her of her love. She had remembered how one frosty morning she
and her lover had walked with linked arms through cold dancing air along
the grassy terrace that divided the pastures, the green bank to the east
sloping to a ditch whose bright water gave back the morning sky, the
bank to the west sloping white with rime to a ditch of black ice; or she
had remembered how, one summer night when the sky was a yellow clot of
starshine, she had sat in the long grass under the sea-wall with his
head in her lap. And then she had remembered the end.

It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years. Yet it
seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because
he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen's lover
would be a living thing in thirty years' time.... It would be immutably
glorious as his mother's love had been interminably grievous. Yet
suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant
wooing any more. It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his
mother was going through one of her bad times. He would have to go to
Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.

And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else
happened to blanch his temper. A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him
with a lurching course that made him wonder at