Dark and still but warm with the life she had breathed into it, monolithic in the mass and firmness of its institution yet a web of her own weaving, it endured about and around her, cradled her, dug its roots deep into earth that it might sustain her, held its head up to the skies that it might shield her from the elements, opposed the thickness of its walls between her and the world of ungenerous passions: her Home, the one thing in her life she could assert she had created.
Twenty-six, mistress of riches she had never needed to compute, safe at anchor in an enviable station, idle but for an ordered round of duties and diversions so stale it was hardly of more mental moment to her than the running of her blood, not yet a mother....
At length she opened the book. But its lines of print ran and blended, hypnogogic images, fugitive and fragmentary, formed and faded on the type-dark pages: Dobbin's face again, so changed yet the same, with that look at once disturbing and agreeable of curbed hunger in the eyes; the face of Amelie Severn, with a stagey effect of shadows cast by table-lights, piquant with mirthful mischief as she looked round, at once challenging and apprehensive of Bel's next essay in amorous impudence; and Bel's face with glimmering eyes and that tensity in the set of the jaw which, in the sight of his wife, had but one meaning....
An echoless clap of sound penetrated the walls, the slam of a cab door. Lucinda dropped her book. The front doors crashed resoundingly. She turned out her light and lay listening, watchful.
Beneath the door that communicated with Bel's room a rim of gold shone out. She heard him stumble against a chair and swear at it, turned quietly on her side, away from the door, and composed herself to sleep.
Some minutes after, a yellow light splashed athwart her bed.
"Linda?" Bel's tongue, as thick as she had expected it to be, called again, insistently: "Linda? 'Wake, Linda?"
She made no stir at all, and presently he closed the door and she heard him grumbling, then a click as he switched off his bedside lamp.
Later he began to snore, something he never did unless he had been drinking heavily.
Her drowsy time had passed, not to return. She lay for hours, looking wide-eyed into darkness, thinking.