"Don't try to dig me out of my 'hole.' I can 'go on living in it for ever' if I'm never taken out. But if I got out once it would be awful coming back. It isn't awful now. Don't make it awful."
He only wrote: "I'll make it awfuller and _aw_fuller, until out you come."
XXXII
I.
Things were happening in the village.
The old people were dying. Mr. James had died in a fit the day after
Christmas Day. Old Mrs. Heron had died of a stroke in the first week of
January. She had left Dorsy her house and furniture and seventy pounds a
year. Mrs. Belk got the rest.
The middle-aged people were growing old. Louisa Wright's hair hung in a limp white fold over each ear, her face had tight lines in it that pulled it into grimaces, her eyes had milky white rings like speedwell when it begins to fade. Dorsy Heron's otter brown hair was striped with grey; her nose stood up sharp and bleak in her red, withering face; her sharp, tender mouth drooped at the corners. She was forty-nine.
It was cruel, cruel, cruel; it hurt you to see them. Rather than own it was cruel they went about pulling faces and pretending they were happy. Their gestures had become exaggerated, tricks that they would never grow out of, that gave them the illusion of their youth.
The old people were dying and the middle-aged people were growing old.
Nothing would ever begin for them again.
Each morning when she got out of bed she had the sacred, solemn certainty that for her everything was beginning. At thirty-nine.