s it, so cold
and white, so uncompromising, so scornful of other less solid
staircases. Very ancient, too--went back a long, long way and would
last, just like that, for ever!

What people it must have known, what scenes, what catastrophes
encountered! About it, on either side, the hall vanished into blackness;
here a gleaming portrait, there some antlers, here again an
eighteenth-century gentleman with a full wig and the Beaminster nose and
comfortable contempt in his eyes ... and, around and about it all,
silence; no sound from any part of the house penetrated here.

Up the stone staircase, passages, doors, more family portraits, more
staircase, more passages, more doors and, somewhere, in some hidden
solemnity, the ticking of a clock, so lonely in all that silence that
every now and again it would catch its breath with a little whir, as
though it wondered whether it really could go on in the teeth of so
contemptuous an indifference.

Rachel Beaminster's sitting-room overlooked Portland Place, and caught
the sun on lucky days for quite a time. It was small, square of shape,
like a box with a high window, a tiny fireplace, an arm-chair, and a
squat table with a bright blue cloth.

Always during the two years that had been devoted to "finishing" in
Munich she had had that little room, cosy, compact, before her. Now did
it seem a little shabby, the carpet and tablecloth and curtains a little
faded; it yet had its cosiness, there in the heart of the great waste
and desert that the house presented to her.

The little silver clock on the mantelpiece had struck five: she had come
back with Aunt Adela from the picture gallery, and, hearing voices in
the Long Drawing-room (the voices said, "My dear Adela, we just
came...." "Adela dear, how well...."), she slipped up the stairs and
secured her own refuge, and rang for tea to be brought to her there.

She wanted to think: she wanted to lie in the arm-chair there with the
window a little open and the evening air coming from the park across
Portland Place curiously scented like the sea.

As she lay back in her chair her body seemed fragile, and, almost, in
its abandonment, exhausted. Under the black eyes her cheeks and neck
were very white, and her black hair gave it all the intensest setting.

She _was_ tired, horribly tired, and she wondered, vaguely, as she lay
there how she was ever to manage this life that, in three days' time,
she must take up and carry, a life that