When Mrs Rosetree got home, the strings of the parcels were eating into her plump gloves. She was trailing the fox cape as if the bull had been too much for her. "Hoo-oo!" she called. "Hiya?" That was for Colonel Livermore, who made careful noises back. His wife would avert her eyes from the Rosetrees' side, but the colonel, a mild man, and just, had in the beginning offered cuttings of pussy willow, and imparted several Latin names. "Home again!" replied the colonel with his usual exactitude. But Mrs Rosetree seldom listened to the words her neighbour spoke. She was content to bathe in the desirable, if rather colourless distinction the colonel's dried-up person still managed to exude. Now Mrs Rosetree chose to remark, with a special kind of tenderness, from her side of the photinias, "That, I always think, is such a pretty little thing." Although she was in no mood for any bally plant. "That," replied the colonel, "is oxalis." And pulled it smartly up. Mrs Rosetree could not care. "Well," she said, "I am quite fagged out." She had learnt it from Colonel Livermore himself. "I am going to lay-lie down, I don't mind telling you, Colonel," she said, "and rest my poor, exhausted feet before the kids come in." At that hour the shapes of the garden, in which she had never really felt at home, were beginning to dissolve, the bricks of the house were crumbling. If the interior resisted, it was because her instincts kept the rooms stretched tight, at least the essential part of them, or comforting primeval form, and she could have wandered endlessly at dusk through her version of the stuffy, felted tents, touching, when her spirit craved for reassurance, the material advantages with which she had filled a too heroic archetype. So she trailed now. But frowning for her husband. She had no intention of announcing her return. But would let him come to her, out of the shadows, and kiss her on a dimple, or the nape of her neck. But she could not stop frowning. It was for Marge now, who had kept on not exactly looking at her. Somehow sideways. Sort of peculiar. All through that lousy picture. So Mrs Rosetree frowned her way into the bathroom. She had very little confidence, not even in her own breath, but would gargle every so often. The bathroom was lighter, of course, than the other rooms, because it was full of glass, as well as the translucence of pastel plastic. But brittler, too. And constricted. With the window shut, the airlessness would sometimes make a person choke. All of a sudden Mrs Rosetree could have felt a cord tighten round her throat. She began to scream, right down, it seemed, to the source of breath. She was ballooning with it. "_Aacccchhhh__!" she screamed. Then held back what remained. To force out the words when she had mustered them. She did moan a little, in between. "_Oÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ__!" For the forgotten tendernesses. But her shame hung too heavy. Its bulk bumped against her. "_Du__! DU!" she was shouting at the tiles. "_Du verwiester Mamser__!" Mrs Rosetree was running through the house, forgetful of the furniture she knew. One particularly brutal chair struck her in a private place. She kicked free once, hobbled by the soft shadows, or a fox cape. And reached the garden, a place of malice, which she had always hated, she realized, for its twigs messing her hair, spiders tossed down her front, and the voices of the _goyim__ laughing for no reason, at a distance, through redundant trees. "_Hilfe! Hilfe! Hören Sie__!" Mrs Rosetree was imploring quite hysterically by the time she reached the photinia hedge. "_Mein verrückter Mann hat sich__…" Colonel Livermore's emaciated face was shocked by such lack of control. Mrs Rosetree remembered as quickly as she had forgotten. "Colonel," she said, "I am terribly distressed. You will forgive, Colonel Livermore. But my husband. If you will do me the favour, please, to come. My hubby has hung hisself. In the bathroom. With the robe cord." "Great Scott!" cried Colonel Livermore, and started to climb through the photinias. "In the bathroom!" Fleetingly, Mrs Rosetree feared it might have been a lapse of taste. "My husband was nervous, Colonel Livermore. He was sick. Yoÿ-yoÿ! Nobody is to blame. It was never ever anybody's fault when the mind was sick. Eh?" Unless the fault of that old Jew who came. Shulamith remembered. Before darkness slapped her in the face with a bunch of damp leaves. "_Nein__!" she moaned, right from the depths, and continued protesting from some region her companion had never suspected, let alone entered. "There is also the power of evil, that they tell us about in the beginning-oh, long! long! — and we forget, because we are leading this modern life-until we are reminded." Colonel Livermore was relieved that his wife had gone for the day to cousins at Vaucluse, thus avoiding such a distasteful experience. He, who hated to be touched, could feel the rings of the hysterical Jewess eating into his dry skin. So he was borne along, detached, a splinter stuck in the scented flesh of darkness. The night was whirling with insects and implications. His wooden soul might have practised indefinite acceptance, if the brick steps had not jarred him from the toes upward, back into his human form. The woman, too, was jolted back to reason. This return made them both, it seemed, top-heavy, and as they mounted the steps, they were jostling each other with their shoulders and elbows, almost knocking each other down. "Excuse me, Colonel!" Mrs Rosetree laughed, but coughed it away. Rejuvenated by some power unidentified, she was becoming obsessed by a need for tidiness. "So many little details arise out of a sudden death in the family," she had to explain. "I must ring Mr Theobalds. Must come over. Put me in the picture. It is only right. Only practical. With two young kids. To show where I stand." So the details accumulated, and the blood was distending their fingers, but finally there was no reason for delaying their entry into the house of the man who had hanged himself.