pinch of poverty? . . . She went to the next room, to her children: they had been out and were playing prettily, while the nurse sat at the window sewing; and now she did not know what to do next. . . . What an existence, in the winter, in a village like this, in a big house, a house full of sick people and mad people! As it happened, through the window she saw Uncle Ernst walking along the road, with his back bent under his long coat, talking to himself as he returned to his rooms in the villa where he was being looked after: what an existence, oh, what an existence . . . for a young and healthy woman like herself! She was never susceptible to melancholy; but she felt a twilight descending upon her from the unrelieved sky overhead. She could have wept. . . . And yet she could have stood it all, if only she had possessed Addie entirely. . . . If only she could win him entirely, she thought, suddenly; and suddenly it occurred to her that she did possess him . . . but not entirely, not entirely. . . . He escaped her, so to speak, in part. . . . They had love, they had fervour in common; they had the children in common; they had bonds of sympathy, physical sympathy almost. She felt happy in his arms and he in hers; but for the rest he escaped her. Something of his innermost being, something of his soul, the quintessence of his soul, escaped her, whereas she gave herself wholly to him and did not feel within herself those secret things which refused to surrender themselves. . . . She felt it, she understood it now; suddenly, under the grey melancholy of the skies, as though she suddenly saw clearly in that twilight; she understood it: their love was merely physical! Oh, he escaped her; and she did not know how she was ever to win him entirely, so as to have him all to herself, all to herself! . . . Perhaps if she began to take an interest
