Ann was still undecided about Felix. At least she told herself that she was undecided, although the comparative steadiness with which she endured the interval which she had imposed upon them both sometimes suggested to her that she must have decided in his favour, that she must by now, without noticing it, have crossed the line. Yet she went on from moment to moment without doing or saying anything decisive. The great dazzling void which had, at the end of her talk with Douglas Swann, so authoritatively contained her, was shrunken now and darkened and crossed with the old cares. She felt, about Randall, a little less mad. But she did not really feel free or like a person who decides things. She was, after all, the same timid conscientious worrying Ann. She had not achieved, after all, a new personality.

Ann had never really had the conception of doing what she wanted.

The idea of doing what she ought, early and deeply implanted in her soul, and sedulously ever since cultivated, had by now almost removed from her the possibility, even as something prima jacie, of a pure self-regarding movement of will. She felt, at the moment, the lack of this strong uncomplicated machinery. The clamorous needs which devoured her were hideously unpractical, and she envied those for whom the want and the grasping movement were one and the same thing. She was prepared, moreover, and especially when she considered the wreck of her: marriage with Randall and what she had somehow done to Randall, to see in her absence of straightforward operative desires something corrupting, something deadening. There was, in her open formless life, some dreadful lack of vigour, some lack of any hard surface to grasp or to brace oneself against; and as she thus accused herself, ready almost to call her good and evil, she found herself again echoing some of Randall's words. She had not got a new personality. But the old one was certainly cracked.

She had not succeeded, either, with Miranda; and it sometimes seemed to her that both Randall and Miranda shrank away from her for the same reason. They needed about them the invigorating presence of shapely human wills; and they could not but see Ann's absence, in this sense, of personality as something mean and spiritless and almost insincere. The idea had sometimes occurred to Ann, and she hated it, that quite involuntarily and unreasonably she made them both feel guilty. But now it seemed to her more likely that their reaction to her was a sort of aesthetic one. They found something messy, something depressing, in her mode of existence. And now it was she who felt the guilt.

It was by this time desperately necessary for her to talk to Miranda about Felix. It was not that she expected Miranda to have much to say about this, and she did not really expect anything in the way of an argument. She would put the matter to her, she thought, rather vaguely. But it was necessary simply to have said these things, to have at least mentioned his name; and Ann was surprised to find how hard It was to bring herself to do so. The sudden growth of her relation with Felix might seem to any observer odd and even improper. Whatever would Miranda, who loved her father so much, make of these hints? With this reluctance to speak came a nervous anxiety which was now almost unbearable. There seemed a taboo on speaking of Felix to her daughter; and Ann knew that until she had broken this she would not be able to think further about what she was going to do. At moments she suspected that once she had spoken of the matter, however remotely, with Miranda she would be awakened to the fact that she had indeed crossed the line; and then she saw Miranda in a benevolent light, as a helper, as someone who would bring her to a bright new consciousness of herself.

Meanwhile there was the task of deceiving Felix; for that was what it came to. Though she longed for his company, she was afraid to see too much of him in case there should be some revelation of her need which, if he were but to glimpse it, would whirl them blindly farther on. She did not want too much to enslave him when she was still not certain that she would keep him; and she did not want to be herself driven mad by his loss, if it should come to that. She wanted to see what she was doing; but this was what, with Miranda watchful, curious, morose, terribly present and officially unenlightened, she was not able to do. Her ideas remained separate and-refused to crystallize into a policy. She wondered if having failed in one marriage she should hastily contract another. She wondered if she would make a soldier's wife. She wondered if Randall would ever come back. She wondered about marriage, and Miranda, and Marie-Laure. She doubted everything except that she and Felix were in love. If only she could, quite simply, see that as the solution. She craved for that simplicity as for some unattainable degree of asceticism.

'Do stop walking about the room, said Miranda. 'You make me quite tired. Do stop or sit down. If you're going to stay.

'Sorry, dear, said Ann. She stopped again behind the table.

Miranda must think she was behaving oddly. She was behaving oddly. But the great dark void of the house gaped behind her and she could not bring herself to leave her daughter's room. She must speak to her now.

'What are you so nervous about? said Miranda. 'You're making me nervous.

They stared at each other in the silence of the house, and it was as if they were listening for distant footsteps. If there were other listeners they were hostile ones. Ann shivered. A big white furry moth entered through the window and began to circle the lamp. Beneath them was Randall's empty room.

'I'm sorry.

'Don't keep saying you're sorry. Tell me what's the matter.

'Nothing's the matter, said Ann. She started pacing again. The room about her seemed tattered, shabby, dusty, untidy, as if she and Miranda had been jumbled together in an old bag. Nancy Bowshott was supposed to clean it. Ann took some faded roses off the mantelpiece and dropped them into the waste-paper basket.

'Miranda, she said, 'would you mind if I married again?»

There was a silence in which the fluttering of the moth could be heard. It was beating on the inside of the lamp shade. Ann knew that these were the wrong words. Yet what ought she to have said? She turned towards her daughter.

Miranda's face was a wooden mask. She plumped up her pillows and sat up straighter. 'But there's no question of that, is there?

'Oh well, there might be, said Ann. She added, 'It's only a very vague possibility, you know, nothing immediate! She was sounding guilty already. A scroll of coloured glass, like a misshapen marble, was lying in the fireplace. She picked it up.

The silence continued until she had to look back again, when Miranda said, 'But you are married. To Daddy.

'Yes, but I suppose I won't go on being.

'I thought marriages were for always, said Miranda. She was tense, pinning Ann with her gaze.

Ann felt within herself the blissful stir of a selfish will. She welcomed it as a mother might welcome the first movement of her unborn child. She said, and then regretted it, 'Your father doesn't think so. Then she added, 'You know that he wants a divorce. He wants to marry someone else.

Miranda said after a moment. 'That's what he says now.

'Do you think he'll — stop wanting that?

'Well, he might, mightn't he?

Ann tossed the piece of coloured glass in her hand. The room constrained her, closing in upon her, soft and flabby. She wanted to shake it away with her shoulders. She said, 'You saw Daddy, didn't you, when he came that time — a little before he — wrote to me.

'Yes.

'Did he say anything then which — well, about going away for good? He must have let you know that he was. Ann was breathless. She felt she was asking the wrong questions. She could feel Miranda's will controlling her from the bed. She walked to and fro like an animal upon a short string. She could feel the cord jerking.