Nature's game, the tree and the snail

She thinks of jumping up to check what the mark really is. But she sees this as Nature's game: Nature prompts us to act, to end thoughts that excite or pain us. That is why we feel a slight contempt for men of action: they never think.

Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which sets out who follows whom, is just the kind of fixed order that no one dares to challenge.

Looking at the mark feels like grasping a plank in the sea: something solid and real, like the reassuring sight of the chest of drawers after a nightmare.

She lovingly imagines the tree from which wood comes: its slow growth, its storms, its rising sap, the insects on its bark, and its long life afterwards, as wood, in rooms and ships.

Then her thoughts dissolve. Someone stands over her and says he is going out to buy a newspaper, though it is no good buying newspapers, since nothing ever happens. He curses the war, and adds that he does not see why they should have a snail on their wall. 'Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.' A long reflection ends with a very ordinary answer.