Lydia Brangwen, the mother, also came and saw the impressive, inviolable body of the dead man. She went pale, seeing death. He was beyond change or knowledge, absolute, laid in line with the infinite. What had she to do with him? He was a majestic Abstraction, made visible now for a moment, inviolate, absolute. And who could lay claim to him, who could speak of him, of the him who was revealed in the stripped moment of transit from life into death? Neither the living nor the dead could claim him, he was both the one and the other, inviolable, inaccessibly himself.

“I shared life with you, I belong in my own way to eternity,” said Lydia Brangwen, her heart cold, knowing her own singleness.

“I did not know you in life. You are beyond me, supreme now in death,” said Anna Brangwen, awe-stricken, almost glad.