Page 177 - swanns-way

may be, cruel. Of course, since my aunt’s strength, which
was completely drained by the slightest exertion, returned
but drop by drop into the pool of her repose, the reservoir
was very slow in filling, and months would go by before she
reached that surplus which other people use up in their dai-
ly activities, but which she had no idea—and could never
decide how to employ. And I have no doubt that then—just
as a desire to have her potatoes served with béchamel sauce,
for a change, would be formed, ultimately, from the plea-
sure she found in the daily reappearance of those mashed
potatoes of which she was never ‘tired’—she would ex-
tract from the accumulation of those monotonous days (on
which she so much depended) a keen expectation of some
domestic cataclysm, instantaneous in its happening, but vi-
olent enough to compel her to put into effect, once for all,
one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial
to her health, but to which she could never make up her
mind without some such stimulus. She was genuinely fond
of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury of weeping
for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she
felt ‘well’ and was not in a perspiration, the news that the
house was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest
of us had already perished, a fire which, in a little while,
would not leave one stone standing upon another, but from
which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape
without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from
her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect
which combined with the two minor advantages of let-
ting her taste the full savour of her affection for us in long

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