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so much resembled those of the outside world that she made little distinction between the two. It was her hope that this might all die down, from lack of recruits or fuel or, most of all, if more people were to take less notice. She did what she could by adding no further heat.
    Continuously reflecting, she seldom thought. She, apart from liking having her fortune told, had no particular attitude to the future, but she had an instinctive aversion from the past; it seemed to her a sort of pompous imposture; as an idea it bored her; it might not be too much to say that she disapproved of it. She enjoyed being: how could it not depress her to realize that the majority of people no longer were? Most of all she mistrusted the past’s activity and its queeringness—she knew no one, apart from her own contemporaries, who did not speak of it either with falsifying piety or with bitterness; she sometimes had had the misfortune to live through hours positively contaminated by its breath. Oh, there lay the root of all evil!—this continuous tedious business of received grievances, not-to-be-settled old scores. Yes, so far as she was against anything she was against the past; and she felt entitled to raid, despoil, rifle, balk or cheat it in any possible way. She gloried in having set free the dress. But the letters—had they not insisted on forcing their own way out?
    Jane, in bed, had been deep in the letter holding the word ‘obelisk’ when Antonia’s footstep made her blow out the candle. This was the one to which she at once returned, and which, after some few invaded hours of sleep, she had carried outdoors with her next morning, to re-read under the monument itself.

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    The family spent that morning mostly apart—except that Jane, at about eleven o’clock, made her way out to the haymaking and her father. No topic therefore was raised until they gathered for midday dinner, which found Antonia in a public mood.
    Jane, back again into gingham showing her limbs, slid into her seat at table all fresh serenity. Fred, pleased with life, came in as far as the doorway still absently towelling his neck; Lilia ladled out stew at arm’s length, leaning away to avoid steam, and Maud, having seized the occasion to ask a blessing, now eyed the hot pot, wondering what would come of it. She and Jane faced across at Antonia, who, not wearing sunglasses, had her back to the light. Blinds were down over the open windows, the door through to the passage was propped ajar, and the wallpaper was of a smoky crimson which absorbed some of the glare from outdoors—the dining-room was tolerable enough. The table, no worse for being too large, was spread with a starchless damask cloth, and two or three pieces of Sheffield plate—biscuit box, mustard pot, trolley for pickle-jars—adorned it for the benefit of Antonia. The dinner plates, patterned with blue roses, were chipped at the rims; their glaze was fissured and browned from having often baked too long in the oven.
    Fred slung the towel out through the door to Kathie, sleeked his hair, unrolled his shirt-sleeves and slumped into his place at the top of the table—he nodded good morning to Antonia and began to eat, in his methodical, rapid, abstracted way. Lilia fanned at herself and the stew with a paper napkin; Antonia reached for the water jug; Jane and Maud side-by-side sat silent and clean. The inappropriateness of the fuming dish to the torrid day was noted, but only as one more stroke of fate: Antonia, for one, did not bat an eyelid. Her indifference to all food other than really good made her slow to distinguish between the bad and the worse—if she felt queasy she did not appear at all; at other times she ate enough to pass. On the whole she showed the best of her character, or at any rate its negative better side, at meals: seldom in her destructive life had she criticized what laid itself open, nor could she be bothered taking it out of anyone, particularly Lilia, in the smaller