ved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the
caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff
tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking
queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she
had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to
the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the
breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and
carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in
digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her
heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible
derider.

"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped.
"Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up
the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human
beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get
myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the
Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a
time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk
and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing
at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she
had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the
larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam
her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had
always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being
chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it
liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being
glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an
exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that
flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a
violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was
silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common
and precious too.

She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken
with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the
touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that
she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not
grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfull