“Whether if a sensibility is blunted it can ever grow sharp again.”
“No. I suppose that’s it. How can it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. It’s a perfectly awful idea, I think.”
“It is awful—because we are all blunting our sensibilities all the time—are we not?”
“That’s just it—whether we ought.”
“Does one always know?”
“Don’t you think so? There’s a feeling. Yes I think one always knows.”
“Suppe, children.”
Miriam took her bowl with eager embarrassment ... the sugar-basin, the pudding basin and the slop bowl together on a tray, the quickly produced soup—the wonderful rich life the girls lived in their glowing rooms—each room with a different glow.... Jan’s narrow green clean room with its suite and hair brushes and cosmetics and pictures of Christ, Mag’s crowded shadowy little square, its litter and its many photographs, their eiderdowns and baths and hot water bottles; the kitchen alive with eyes and foreheads—musicians, artists philosophers pasted on the walls ... why? Why?... Jan with wonderful easy knowledge of the world’s great people ... and strange curious intimate liking for them ... the sad separate effect of all those engraved faces ... the perfectly beautiful blur they made all together in patches on the walls ... the sitting room, Mag, nearly all Mag, except the photographs on the mantelpiece ... the whole rooms from the top of the stairs ... her thoughts folded down; they were not going away; not; that was certain.
“I say I can’t go on for ever eating your soup.”