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could find a phrase to sum-up, to carry with her to-morrow into the future; but the wind had sprung up rather boisterously and the curtains flapped and wound themselves round her. She disentangled herself and began to undress. ‘Marion Vanbrugh is not a name that promises well,’ she thought, as she got into bed and struck her toes upon the stone bottle.
    Downstairs, Mrs Turner laid down her speckly knitting and lit a cigarette in a rather amateurish way. From the bookcase she took a little mottled volume vaguely entitled The
Classical Tradition
, which she had written years ago, enriching herself to the extent of eight pounds. On the flyleaf she wrote in red ink ‘To Cassandra Dashwood, with love from Lucy Turner.’ Then she wiped her fingers on a piece of blotting-paper and puffed a little more at her cigarette. ‘Dear Cassandra,’ she sighed. She was a fundamentally optimistic woman and was perfectly prepared for her little book to go a long way to changing some of Cassandra’s melancholy and romantic notions about life, and substituting in their stead, perhaps, that cool and truthful regard which she herself so deeply admired. ‘To see life steadily and see it whole,’ she murmured, putting the little present where she would be sure to find it in the morning. The cigarette was too much for her; she was tired of waving away the smoke. She threw it on the fire.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    The wet fields were dealt out one after another for Cassandra’s benefit. She sat with her back to the engine (as Mrs Turner had seen her off), with
The Classical Tradition
and a pile of sandwiches wrapped in a stiff damask napkin on her lap. Sodden cattle stood facing north, or hunched under hedges in the drizzle. The train ripped through the sullen landscape like scissors through calico; each time it veered round westwards rain hit the window in long slashes. ‘Is it time we move through or space?’ Cassandra wondered, lulled by the sequence of the English landscape – the backs of houses and sheds, fields, a canal with barges, brickworks, plantations, the little lane going down under the bridge, fields, the backs of houses. Then the wet blackness of stations, sidings, the jagged edge of shelters beneath which people stood bleakly with luggage, and sometimes children, awaiting trains.
    The Classical Tradition
had a strange fungus smell and its pages were stippled with moles. The prose was formal and exact, remote from Mrs Turner’s personality and yielding up nothing between the lines, so Cassandra clicked open her little case and brought out
The Woman in White
.
    Behind the cover of the book, she smuggled up her egg sandwiches and began to eat, secretly and without enjoyment, her fingers searching furtively in the table napkin, the printed page guarding her shyness. The other people in the compartment eyed her in a drowsy, dully baleful way, jogging on, lulled into blankness of mind by the rocking of the train, anaesthetised almost by the rain and the darkening afternoon and the train’s rhythm; each wrapped away separately in a cocoon woven of vague dreaming and reflection.
    Cassandra folded up the last two sandwiches, brushed some crumbs of egg-yolk off her skirt and began to look out of the window again.
    The train was winding its way through water-meadows, and had begun to slow up as the landscape grew lusher and wetter, as if oppressed by the moisture-laden hedges and low, swollen clouds. The plump woman opposite Cassandra smoothed on her gloves, cleared a little space on the misty glass with her cuff, peered out, sank back, holding her ticket ready, yawning repeatedly.
    ‘Oh, I’m yawning,’ she said, catching Cassandra’s glance, patting her mouth with her fist, her eyes watering. ‘Tiring weather.’
    Cassandra agreed, feeling ill at ease, vaguely suspicious of the blonde ripeness of the woman, embarrassed by her, as the young are embarrassed at being singled out by their elders.
    ‘You going far?’
    ‘To