a reviewer. She was regarding them, too, with something of the
reviewer's pained and inimical distaste, dipping now into one, shutting
it with a sharp sigh, trying another; flinging it on the floor with an
ejaculation of anger and fatigue.

Grandmama woke with a start, and said "What fell? Did something fall?"
and adjusted her glasses and opened the Autobiography again.

"A sadly vulgar, untruthful and ill-written book. The sort of
autobiography Gilbert's wife will write when she has time. It reminds me
very much of her letters, and is, I am sure, still more like the diary
which she no doubt keeps. Poor Gilbert...." Grandmama seemed to be
confusing Gilbert momentarily with the Cabinet Minister. "I remember,"
she went on, "meeting this young woman at Oxford, in the year of the
first Jubilee.... A very bright talker. They can so seldom
write...." She dozed again.

"Will this intolerable day," Mrs. Hilary enquired of the housemaid
who came in to make up the fire, "never be over? I suppose it will be
bed-time _some time_...."

"It's just gone a quarter past six, ma'am," said the housemaid, offering
little hope, and withdrew.

Mrs. Hilary went to the window and drew back the curtains and looked out
at Marine Crescent in the gloomy, rainy twilight. The long evening
stretched in front of her--the long evening which she had never learnt to
use. Psycho-analysis, which had made her so much better while the course
lasted, now that it was over (and it was too expensive to go on with
forever) had left her worse than before. She was like a drunkard deprived
suddenly of stimulants; she had nothing to turn to, no one now who took
an interest in her soul. She missed Mr. Cradock and that bi-weekly hour;
she was like a creeper wrenched loose from its support and flung flat on
the ground. He had given her mental exercises and told her to continue
them; but she had always hated mental exercises; you might as well go in
for the Pelman course and have done. What one needed was a _person_. She
was left once more face to face with time, the enemy; time, which gave
itself to her lavishly with both hands when she had no use for it. There
was nothing she wanted to do with time, except kill it.

"What, dear?" murmured Grandmama, as she rattled the blind tassel against
the sill. "How about a game of piquet?"

But Mrs. Hilary hated piquet, and all card games, and halma, and
dominoes, and everything. Grandmama used to have friends in to play wi