Step by step Stella passed with him, by all the hidden and vivid obstacles between his soul and victory, between it and defeat.
She could do nothing, but she could not stop her ceaseless watchfulness. She was like some one who strains his eyes forever down an empty road. The days began to lengthen into a long cold spring. There were no outward changes in her life: the drafty town hall, the long bus-rides, the bad news from France, and at home the pinch and ugliness of poverty. She had stopped being afraid that people would notice a difference in her. Nobody noticed any difference. She behaved in the same way and did the same things. She had gone down under the waters of life without so much as a splash.
"I suppose," Stella said to herself, "lots of us see ghosts every day without knowing it." She had a vague feeling that Mr. Travers knew it, but that he kept it in the back of his mind like an important paper in a case, which it was no use producing unless you could act upon it.
It was an awful day of snow and wind. Everybody but Stella and the porter had gone home. She had been stupid over the municipal accounts; over and over again her flagging mind stuck at the same mistake. At last she finished. She was still sixpence out; but she might see the sixpence in a flash the next morning, and there would be no flash in anything she could see to-night.
When she reached the door she found the gale had become formidable and chaotic. She staggered out of the town hall into the grip of a fury. All London shook and quivered; trees were torn down and flung across the road like broken twigs; taxis were blown into lamp-posts; the icy air tore and raged and screamed as if the elements had set out to match and overwhelm the puny internecine struggles of man. "This," Stella thought to herself, "is like a battle—noise, confusion, senselessness. I must hold on to whatever keeps stillest, and get home in rushes."
