The electric lamp shone beside the bed and Jennifer lay with her face turned to the wall. All that was visible was her hair, tossed in a rough mass over the pillow and palely burning where the dim light struck it. Her death-like unconsciousness was intolerable pain. She should have stirred at least, feeling a presence through all the seals of sleep.... But she did not move; and night after night the sight of that unstirring hair upon the pillow returned, mocking her longing to reach to Jennifer with a picture that seemed the symbol for all that was eternally uncommunicating and imperturbable.
They said she was to be sent home before the end of term; then that her mother had arrived, was to take her away on the morrow.
That night the message came: Jennifer wanted to say good-bye to Judith.
Jennifer’s boxes stood packed and strapped in a corner. Her personality had already, terrifyingly, been drained from her two rooms. There was now only a melancholy whisper of that which, during the two years of her tenancy, had filled the little space between her walls with a warm mystery. She had become identified with the quickening of imagination, the lyrical impulse. Oh, how ridiculous, how sad, to have made one person into all poetry! To-morrow it would all be finished.
Judith went softly from the sitting-room into the bedroom: and there was Jennifer lying back on her pillow and waiting.
‘Hullo, darling,’ she said. Her voice was low and mournful.
‘Jennifer!’
She put out her hand and Judith took it, clung to it, while Jennifer drew her down beside her on the bed.
‘Jennifer, darling, how are you?’
‘I’m better, I’ve slept. I was so tired. But I’m going away.’