Strange was her position then; and an affectionate onlooker might well have asked himself anxiously what kind of nature she was able to oppose to it. One glance at her might have reassured him and yet served but to shift his anxiety. She looked so self-contained, and so mature that clearly she would never act foolishly; but also there was so much promise of thought and development in eye and brow, and passionate mouth, that it was certain she would not stay long quiescent. The calm of the moment was as an instinctive shield to cover her wounded senses; but soon they would collect themselves and fall to work upon all these difficult matters so lavishly heaped upon them – and with what result?

She was beautiful, but she had not lived for eighteen years without revealing that she was also strong of brain, agile and determined; she had revealed so much in the nursery, where she would meet Thoby in argument, and press on to the very centre of the matter, whether it were question of art or morality. She was also, on her secret side, sensitive to all beauty of colour and form; but she hid this, because her views did not agree with those current around her, and she feared to give pain. Again, she was as quick to detect insincerity of nature as fallacy of argument, and the one fared as ill with her as the other; for her standard was rigid. But then she was bound to certain people by a kind of instinctive fidelity, which admitted of no question; it was, if anything, too instinctive. Such was the feeling she had for Jack before his marriage, and it was the first thread in her devotion to her mother or to Thoby. If her mother had lived it is easy to imagine how Vanessa, questing about her, like some active dog, would have tried one experiment after another, arguing, painting, making friends, disproving fallacies, much to her mother’s amusement; she would have delighted in her daughter’s spirit and adventures, mourned her lack of practical wisdom, and laughed at her failures, and rejoiced in her sense. But that is one of the things, which though they must have happened, yet, incredible though it seems, never did happen, death making an end of all these exquisite preparations. Instead Vanessa was first baffled by her mother’s death, and the unnatural life which for a time was entailed upon us, and now again, Stella’s death set her among entirely new surroundings.

People who must follow obvious tokens, such as the colour of the eye, the shape of the nose, and love to invent a melodramatic fitness in life, as though it were a sensational novel, acclaimed her now the divinely appointed inheritor of all womanly virtues, and with a certain haziness forgot your grandmother’s sharp features and Stella’s vague ones, and created a model of them for Vanessa to follow, beautiful on the surface, but fatally insipid within. Once again we went through the same expressions of sympathy; we heard again and again that so great a tragedy had never happened; sometimes it appeared almost in the light of a work of art; more often it revealed a shapeless catastrophe, from which there could be no recovery. But happily it was time for us to leave London; we had taken a house at Painswick; and the ghastly mourners, the relations and friends, went back to their own homes.

But for us the tragedy was but just beginning; as in the case of other wounds the pain was drugged at the moment, and made itself felt afterwards when we began to move. There was pain in all our circumstances, or a dull discomfort, a kind of restlessness and aimlessness which was even worse. Misery of this kind tends to concentrate itself upon an object, if it can find one, and there was a figure, unfortunately, who would serve our purpose very well. Your grandfather showed himself strangely brisk, and so soon as we came to think, we fastened our eyes upon him, and found just cause for anger. We remembered how he had tasked Stella’s strength, embittered her few months of joy, and now when he should be penitent, he showed less grief than anyone. On the contrary none was more vigorous, and there were signs at once which woke us to a sort of frenzy, that he was quite prepared to take Vanessa for his next victim. When he was sad, he explained, she should be sad; when he was angry, as he was periodically when she asked him for a cheque, she should weep; instead she stood before him like a stone. A girl who had character would not tolerate such speeches, and when she connected them with other words of the same kind, addressed to the sister lately dead, to her mother even, it was not strange that an uncompromising anger took possession of her. We made him the type of all that we hated in our lives; he was the tyrant of inconceivable selfishness, who had replaced the beauty and merriment of the dead with ugliness and gloom. We were bitter, harsh, and to a great extent, unjust; but even now it seems to me that there was some truth in our complaint; and sufficient reason why both parties should be unable at the time and without fault, to come to a good understanding. If he had been ten years younger, or we older, or had there been a mother or sister to intervene, much pain and anger and loneliness might have been spared. But again, death spoilt what should have been so fair.

There was also another cause to fret us and forbid us from judging clearly. Jack who was spending a terrible summer in London came to us regularly on Sunday. He was tired and morose, and it seemed that his only relief was to spend long hours with your mother or with me in a little summer house in the garden; he talked, when he talked, of Stella and the past; there were silences when no words seemed to have meaning; I remember the shape of a small tree which stood in a little hollow in front of us, and how, as I sat holding Jack’s hand, I came to conceive this tree as the symbol of sorrow, for it was silent, enduring and without fruit. But now and then Jack would say something bitter though restrained, about your grandfather and his behaviour to Stella, and how her death had not saddened him. That was enough to sharpen all our feelings against him; for we had an enthusiastic wish to help Jack, and in truth he seemed the person who best understood our misery. But although I shared these vigils equally at first with Vanessa she, by degrees, began to have more of Jack’s favour and confidence than I did; and directly any such favour is shown it becomes more marked and endures. She was the natural person to be with him, and also, as I have said, she had of old an affection for him, which although immature, was easily the starting point of much quicker and more fervent feelings, and the incentive now was urgent.

Profoundly gloomy as this all was, the intolerable part of it was the feeling of difference of temper and aim revealed day by day, among people who must live together.