She would never get used to the house.
She couldn't think why she had been such a fool as to take it. On a seven
years' lease, too; it would feel like being in prison for seven years.
That was the worst of moving about for a whole year in boats and trains,
and staying at hotels; it gave you an unnatural longing to settle down,
in a place of your own.
Your own--Undying lust of possession. If you _had_ to have things, why a
house? Why six rooms when two would have done as well and left you your
freedom? After all that ecstasy of space, that succession of heavenly
places with singing names: Carcassone and Vezelay; Rome and Florence and
San Gimignano; Marseilles and Arles and Avignon; filling up time,
stretching it out, making a long life out of one year.
If you could go moving on and on while time stood still.
Oh this damned house. It would be you sitting still while time tore by,
as it used to tear by at Morfe before Richard came, and in the three
years after he had gone, when Mamma--