One is too harsh to one’s dead self.  One regards it as the executor and residuary legatee of a complicated will dealing with a small estate regards the testator.  Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the closed door and let the walls of her will fall in.  Then it was that her life had been given its bias towards her misery.  Then it was there was conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present should die.  “What tragedy?  What tragedy?” she said derisively, sitting up in bed.  There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self.  “The tragedy,” it answered composedly.  “The tragedy.  Did you not know almost as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black fire?  Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he has done has ever surprised you?  Even so, you have always known that the end of you and yours will be tragedy.”  “What could happen to my Richard?” she argued.  “He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness.  Tragedy cannot touch him unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods.  There are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will.”  She groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot thoughtfulness of life.  But indeed she gained some comfort from this dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage to live.

Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or Richard.  She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to abandon conflict and do what people wished to do.  It knew, what her consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was within her mother’s womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live.  While she had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of her terror like a naked man above whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had been the thunder.  Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo knew what the born know as faintness.  The system of delicate mechanical adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to live was overcast by doubt.  If she could rest here now, and go home and have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it and it would decide to live.  But if Harry’s mother came to see her next day it would forsake her.