The large bay windows were naked, the
floor was stripped, and a border of dark polish went round the tract of
pale boarding.
In the faded wallpaper were dark patches where furniture had stood,
where pictures had hung. The sense of walls, dry, thin, flimsy-seeming
walls, and a flimsy flooring, pale with its artificial black edges, was
neutralising to the mind. Everything was null to the senses, there was
enclosure without substance, for the walls were dry and papery. Where
were they standing, on earth, or suspended in some cardboard box? In
the hearth was burnt paper, and scraps of half-burnt paper.
'Imagine that we passed our days here!' said Ursula.
'I know,' cried Gudrun. 'It is too appalling. What must we be like, if
we are the contents of THIS!'
'Vile!' said Ursula. 'It really is.'
And she recognised half-burnt covers of 'Vogue'--half-burnt
representations of women in gowns--lying under the grate.
They went to the drawing-room. Another piece of shut-in air; without
weight or substance, only a sense of intolerable papery imprisonment in
nothingness.
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