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complacently, considering their shape, and their pallor.
    She could hear the shop door-bell ringing below as customers came and went. So many women saved their shopping for the evening and a gossip while their husbands went to the Garibaldi or the Volunteer. In the cosy shop such confidences went on while Mrs Deverell weighed broken biscuits or drew the wire neatly through the cheese. “Not that I’d like it to go any further.” Mrs Deverell had usually heard before. She had asked for it, she would say, or he had asked for it; who could expect other—in a world where marriages were not made by Mrs Deverell—than that they should turn out as they did, with wives pretending their bruised eyes were got from bumping into the wardrobe, or that they would pay a little off next week, then running to the pawn-shop with the flat-iron every Tuesday and fetching it under their cloaks the following Monday.
    Mrs Deverell’s own married life had been short and flawless in retrospect. Her husband had coughed his way through only a year and a half of married bliss. His photograph was all Angel knew of him. The memory of him had faded more than the photograph, which showed a wax-work of a man with a curly beard and ill-fitting clothes. Angel disowned him. Her brisk, brave, vivacious mother had long ago forgotten him. She had her sister and her neighbours and Angel to boast about to them. ‘That Angel’, the girl was called in consequence. She was solitary without knowing.
    Lax and torpid, she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day—with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps—beyond anything her aunt had ever suggested. Acquisitively, from photographs and drawings in history-books, she added one detail after another. That will do for Paradise House, was an obsessive formula which became a daily habit. The white peacocks would do; and there were portraits in the Municipal Art Gallery which would do; as would the cedar trees at school. As the house spread, those in it grew more shadowy. Angel herself took over Madam’s jewel-box and Madam’s bed and husband. Only that other Angelica balked her imagination, a maddening obstacle, with her fair looks and all her dogs and horses. Again and again, as Angel wandered in the galleries and gardens, the vision of that girl, who had no place in her dreams, rose up and impeded her. The dream itself, which was no idle matter, but a severe strain on her powers of concentration, would dissolve. Then she would open her eyes and stare down at her hands, spreading her fingers, turning her wrists.
    At other times she was menaced by intimations of the truth. Her heart would be alarmed, as if by a sudden roll of drums, and she would spring to her feet, beset by the reality of the room, her own face—not beautiful, she saw—in the looking-glass and the commonplace sounds in the shop below. She would know then that she was in her own setting and had no reason for ever finding herself elsewhere; know moreover that she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape. Her panic-stricken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.
    This evening passed without any sense of time going by. She was roaming through moonlit rose-gardens when she heard her mother shutting up the shop, rattling the chains across the door, then slowly climbing the stairs.
    Angel was like a tableau of a girl fallen gracefully asleep over her sewing, the cat sleeping, too, at her feet. The fire had sunk low, just when Mrs Deverell was ready to hold up her skirts and warm her ankles for a moment or two.
    â€œOh, I dropped off,”