The day had been close and sultry, and the bedroom still felt hot after the hours of scorching¹ sunlight on the tiles. Eve drew the curtains back, and opened the casement² to its widest, for the upper windows were still fitted with the old lead-lights. The sill was deep, nearly a foot and a half broad, and Eve half lay and half leant upon it while the night air streamed in.

 

And what a night! All jet and silver; for the moon was up over the fir woods, just as on the night when her mother died. The stillness was the stillness of a dawn where no birds sing. The nightingale had long been mute, and the nightjar preferred the oak woods in the clayland valleys. Eve’s ears could not snatch a single sound out of that vast motionless landscape, with its black woods and mysterious horizons.

 

The silence made her feel lonely, eerily³ lonely, like a sensitive child lost in a wood. She remembered how she had started awake at night sometimes, terrified by this horror of loneliness, and crying out “Mother, mother!” It was absurd that the grown woman should feel like the child, and yet she found herself hungering for that little placid⁴ figure with its boring commonplaces and amiable⁵ soft face. What a prig she had been! She had let that spirit of superiority grow in her, forgetting that the hands that were always knitting those foolish woollen superfluities had held and comforted her as a child. Now, in the white heat of an emotional ordeal⁶, she missed the nearness of that commonplace affection. What a mistake it was to be too clever; for when the heart ached, one’s cleverness stood by like a dreary⁷ pedagogue⁸, helpless and dumb.

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