Does he – does your husband not like music?’ he asked, saying the first thing that came into his head, not really wanting in the least to know what that damned George liked or didn’t like. She hesitated. ‘I – don’t know,’ she said. ‘He – usedn’t to.’ ‘But he doesn’t come here?’ ‘How can he?’ She stopped, and then said softly, ‘The poor darling’s dead.’ His heart gave a bound. A widow. The beastly war had done one good thing, then, – it had removed George.

I was for ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy.

It cannot be right to be the slave of one’s household gods, and I protest that if my furniture ever annoyed me by wanting to be dusted when I wanted to be doing something else, and there was no one to do the dusting for me, I would cast it all into the nearest bonfire and sit and warm my toes at the flames with great contentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to the very next pedlar who was weak enough to buy them. Parsons.

She made him think of his mother, of his nurse, of all things kind and comforting, besides having the attraction of not being his mother or his nurse.

Too often she had seen the first indignation of disappointed parents at the marriage of the their children harden into a matter of pride, a matter of doggedness and principle, and finally become ridiculous. If the marriages turned out happy, how absurd to persist in an antiquated disapproval; if they turned out wretched, then how urgent the special need for love.

And then when I got home I burrowed about among my books, arranging their volumes and loving the feel of them.

After tea, when both Mrs Fisher and Lady Caroline had disappeared again – it was quite evident that nobody wanted her – she was more dejected than ever, overwhelmed by the discrepancy between the splendour outside her, the warm, teeming beauty and self-sufficiency of nature, and the blank emptiness of her heart.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again – not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn’t seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions, to oneself.

You mustn’t long in heaven,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “You’re supposed to be quite complete there. And it is heaven, isn’t it, Rose? See how everything has been let in together – the dandelions and the irises, the vulgar and the superior, me and Mrs. Fisher – all welcome, all mixed up anyhow, and all so visibly happy and enjoying ourselves.

Her great dead friends did not seem worth reading that night. They always said the same things now – over and over again they said the same things, and nothing new was to be got out of them any more for ever. No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?