Birkin, sitting up in bed, looked lazily and pleasantly out on the park, that was so green and deserted, romantic, belonging to the past.

He was thinking how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were--the lovely accomplished past--this house, so still and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace.

And then, what a snare and a delusion, this beauty of static things--what a horrible, dead prison Breadalby really was, what an intolerable confinement, the peace! Yet it was better than the sordid scrambling conflict of the present.

If only one might create the future after one's own heart--for a little pure truth, a little unflinching application of simple truth to life, the heart cried out ceaselessly.
'I can't see what you will leave me at all, to be interested in,' came Gerald's voice from the lower room.

'Neither the Pussums, nor the mines, nor anything else.' 'You be interested in what you can, Gerald.