The dream hand clenched; the real hand lay on the chair arm, the veins swollen but only with a brownish fluid now.

The door opened.

“Am I,” Isa apologized, “interrupting?”

Of course she was—destroying youth and India. It was his fault, since she had persisted in stretching his thread of life so fine, so far. Indeed he was grateful to her, watching her as she strolled about the room, for continuing.

Many old men had only their India—old men in clubs, old men in rooms off Jermyn Street. She in her striped dress continued him, murmuring, in front of the book cases: “The moor is dark beneath the moon, rapid clouds have drunk the last pale beams of even. . . . I have ordered the fish,” she said aloud, turning, “though whether it’ll be fresh or not I can’t promise. But veal is dear, and everybody in the house is sick of beef and mutton. . . . Sohrab,” she said, coming to a standstill in front of them, “What’s HE been doing?”

His tail never wagged. He never admitted the ties of domesticity. Either he cringed or he bit. Now his wild yellow eyes gazed at her, gazed at him. He could outstare them both. Then Oliver remembered:

“Your little boy’s a cry-baby,” he said scornfully.

“Oh,” she sighed, pegged down on a chair arm, like a captive balloon, by a myriad of hair-thin ties into domesticity. “What’s been happening?”

“I took the newspaper,” he explained, “so . . .”

He took it and crumpled it into a beak over his nose. “So,” he had sprung out from behind a tree on to the children.

“And he howled. He’s a coward, your boy is.”

She frowned. He was not a coward, her boy wasn’t. And she loathed the domestic, the possessive; the maternal. And he knew it and did it on purpose to tease her, the old brute, her father-inlaw.

She looked away.

“The library’s always the nicest room in the house,” she quoted, and ran her eyes along the books. “The mirror of the soul” books were. The Faerie Queene and Kinglake’s Crimea; Keats and the Kreutzer Sonata. There they were, reflecting. What? What remedy was there for her at her age—the age of the century, thirty-nine— in books? Book-shy she was, like the rest of her generation; and gun-shy too.