The masses and the gaps between them were of the same substance in her eyes.

She wandered into her past as a child might wander among the rubbish heaps of its old home in ruins.

She was vaguely conscious that there had been a design once in those unsightly mounds, that she had once lived in them.

On that remnant of crazy wall clung a strip of wall-paper which she recognised as the paper in her own nursery; here a vestige of a staircase that had led to her mother's room.

And as a child will gather up a little frockful of sticks and fallen remnants, and then drop them when they prove heavy, so Fay picked up out of her past tiny disjointed odds and ends of ideas and disquieting recollections, only to cast them aside again as burdensome and useless.
The point to which she wandered back most frequently--to stare blankly at it without comprehension--was her husband's appeal to her on his deathbed.