front bedroom, whose windows looked down on the road, and across the country at the black-barred sunset, black and red barred, without light.

They sat down in the window-seat, to wait. Both girls were looking over the room. It was void, with a meaninglessness that was almost dreadful.

‘Really,’ said Ursula, ‘this room COULDN’T be sacred, could it?’

Gudrun looked over it with slow eyes.

‘Impossible,’ she replied.

‘When I think of their lives — father’s and mother’s, their love, and their marriage, and all of us children, and our bringing-up — would you have such a life, Prune?’