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sat up again. She relit her candle, drew out the packet of letters from under her pillow, and went on reading.

    These letters, all in the same hand, were headed by day-names only— ‘Tuesday’, ‘Saturday’, and so on. They had been removed from their envelopes; nothing showed where they had been written or when posted. The writing-paper varied in kind, and, though not yet so aged as to be discoloured, was soiled at the edges, rubbed at the folds. The rubber band round the packet survived the fall from the trunk only to snap, unresilient, at the first pull from Jane—how many years does it take for rubber to rot? The ink, sharp in the candlelight, had not faded. She could not fail, however, when first she handled them, to connect these letters with that long-settled dust: her sense of their remoteness from her entitled her to feel they belonged to history. Honour therefore allowed her to make free of them.
    To start with, she had hardly even been curious. Sweeping the muslin eagerly downstairs with her, she brought the letters with it chiefly because, in her hurry to quit the attic, she could not stay to put them back in the trunk. Tossing them aside, she had gone on to make much of the rescued dress—measuring it up to herself, shaking fullness back again into the smothered folds, finally hanging it near her window that the stuff might revive in the night air. Yet in the very course of those thoughtless minutes, apprehension within her gathered into a peak: the inner course of her life was about to change, and the cause was somewhere here in the room. She was tired, though only as one is tired after pleasure when one is young, with a sort of exalted languor—lightheaded, drained by an access of intense being, seeing and feeling, as though she had fasted instead of dancing, Her nerves, tuned up by the hot night, waited, though not in fear. What was to happen? She began to undress, looking around her, partly expectant and partly docile—there were the letters, on the top of her desk. She went across and stood weighing them in her hand, distantly wondering—how much had shrivelled to this little? Then the word ‘obelisk’ caught her eye.
    Then was it that she gave the tug at the band. When that snapped, down, again, fell the letters, this time altogether spilled out and showering. Vexed by them, gathering them up, she endeavoured to put them into their former order—for that there had been an order, and that it was significant, she did not question—but found that could not be done. This datelessness, because the count of time was being kept in some other way, showed the complicity between two people: but what was Jane to make of it? Only by reading all of them was one to come upon their sequence, the ‘sooner’ or ‘later’ giving them sense and story—and from that undertaking Jane shrank, she thought. She had an optic laziness with regard to ‘writing’ at any time; but there was now more to it—she felt a recoil from, a sensuous distaste or disinclination for these husks, left to be nothing more by the evaporation from them of passion. At the same time, they inspired reluctant awe, and some misgiving: if there were anything in them, let it remain contained!
    Jane was without emotional curiosity; her lack of it was neither failure nor chance but part of a necessary unconcern. She had grown up amid extreme situations and frantic statements; and, out of her feeling for equilibrium, contrived to ignore them as far as possible. Her time, called hers because she was required to live in it and had no other, was in bad odour, and no wonder. Altogether the world was in a crying state of exasperation, but that was hardly her fault: too much had been going on for too long. Like someone bidden to enter an already overcrowded and overcharged room, she paused for as long as possible on the threshold, waiting for something to subside, for the floor to empty or the air to clear. The passions and politics of her family