What would have surprised him if he could have thought about it was that, above it all, above the tenderness and the compunction, he still felt that triumphant sense of sanction and completion, of acquiescence in an end foreappointed and foreseen.
But before he could think about it he was overtaken by an astounding, an incredible drowsiness.
He dragged himself home to his attic and his bed, where, astoundingly, incredibly, he slept.
CHAPTER XII
It was about nine o'clock of another Sunday evening a week later.
Winny Dymond was sitting on the edge of Violet's bed in the little back room in St. Ann's Terrace. Violet, in a white petticoat and camisole, overcome by the heat, lay stretched at length, like a drowsy animal, in the hollow of the bed where she had flung herself. Her head, tilted back, lay in the clasp of her hands. Her breasts, drawn upward by the raised arms, left her all slender to the waist. The soft-folded, finely indented crook of her elbows made a white frame for her flushed face. She was looking at Winny with eyes narrowed to the slits of the sleepy, half-shut lids.
In a thick, sweet voice, a voice too drowsy for anything beyond the bare statement of the fact, she had been telling Winny that she was engaged to be married to Mr. Ransome.
Now she was looking at Winny (all her intelligence narrowed to that thread-fine glint of half-shut eyes), looking to see how Winny would take it.
Winny took it with that blankness that leaves the brain naked to all irrelevant impressions, and with a silence that made all her pulses loud. She heard the rattle and roar of a distant tram and the clock striking the hour in the room below. She saw the soiled lining and the ugly warp of Violet's shoes kicked off and overturned beside the bed. Beyond the shoes, a stain that had faded rose and became vivid on the carpet. Then a film came over Winny's eyes, and on the far border of the field of vision, somewhere toward the top of her head, a yellow chest of drawers with white handles grew dim and quivered and danced like the yellow and white specter of a chest of drawers.