“I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!” she snapped.  “Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up the Mound from sheer force of habit.  Did you never hear that human beings are creatures of habit?  And now I’m here I might as well get myself something to eat.  Besides, I’m not going shauchling down to the Dean Bridge in wet shoes either.”  She kicked them off and moved for a time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade.  But as she put her head into the larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs.  There was nothing, she had always thought, nicer to touch than an egg.  It was cool without being chill, and took the warmth of one’s hand flatteringly soon, as if it liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a violent end.  As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common and precious too.

She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the touch was this world she was going to leave.  It also seemed to her that she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea.  “Mother’ll not grudge it me for my last meal on earth,” she muttered mournfully, putting it in the kettle to save time.  “And I ought to keep up my strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what they’ve lost....”

The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she knew grown-up people never did it.  The bread was good too.  It was only because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to leave.  She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of departure for the fancy.  Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth.  If the name were changed, angels might eat it.  Potato plants were lovely, too.