VIII.
Forty-five. Yesterday she was forty-five, and to-day. To-morrow she would be forty-six. She had come through the dreadful, dangerous year without thinking of it, and nothing had happened. Nothing at all. She couldn't imagine why she had ever been afraid of it; she could hardly remember what being afraid of it had felt like.
Aunt Charlotte—Uncle Victor—
If I were going to be mad I should have gone mad long ago: when Roddy came back; when Mark died; when I sent Richard away. I should be mad now.
It was getting worse.
In the cramped room where the big bed stuck out from the wall to within a yard of the window, Mamma went about, small and weak, in her wadded lavender Japanese dressing-gown, like a child that can't sit still, looking for something it wants that nobody can find. You couldn't think because of the soft pad-pad of the dreaming, sleepwalking feet in the lamb's-wool slippers.
When you weren't looking she would slip out of the room on to the landing to the head of the stairs, and stand there, vexed and bewildered when you caught her.