Mr.Clacton's words repeated themselves accurately in her brain.

She pushed the papers wearily over to the farther side of the table.

It was no use, though; something or other had happened to her brain--a change of focus so that near things were indistinct again.

The same thing had happened to her once before, she remembered, after she had met Ralph in the gardens of Lincoln's Inn Fields; she had spent the whole of a committee meeting in thinking about sparrows and colors, until, almost at the end of the meeting, her old convictions had all come back to her.

But they had only come back, she thought with scorn at her feebleness, because she wanted to use them to fight against Ralph.