like a giant bluebottle. Then she would get up, draw the curtains and look out at the heavy night of trees, grey with darkness melting into darkness: the road beyond the house was grey, like an ashen path; the oak and beeches showed grey, their leafy tops unruffled by the wind; in the front garden the dust-covered standard roses stood erect as pikes and the roses drooped from them, grey and with the tired, pining attitude of heavy flowers hanging from limp stalks. All was grey and silent: only, in the very far distance, a dog barked. And the bedroom, still dark with the night—the nightlight had gone out—began to stifle Marietje so much that she softly opened the door and went through the attic, though Addie had forbidden her to wander about like this at night. She went carefully in noiseless slippers, pale in her night-dress, staring wide-eyed into the grey indoor twilight. She passed the doors of the maids' bedrooms and down the first flight of stairs, stepping very lightly, so that the stairs did not creak. Once on the staircase she breathed more freely, with relief at feeling something more spacious than the air of her room, the relief of unfettered movement, although the grey silence wove such strange great cobwebs all around her, through which she walked down the endless passages. She now went past Uncle's door, Aunt's door, Mamma's door, the girls' doors, past Addie's and Mathilde's empty rooms . . . and she felt that she was very much in love with Addie, silently and without desire, and was always thinking of him, even though she did not always do as he told her, because she simply could not remain in her room and longed even for the out-of-door air, to feel it blowing through the filmy tissues that covered her young body. And, however much without desire, because Addie remained to her the utterly unattainable, yet there
