At night we’d spend most of our time waiting, waiting for the wind or the snow to stop, waiting for the last cries of the peddlers passing by in the street late at night, for the fire to die down so we could put more wood in the stove. On one of those winter nights during which we spoke very little, often drifting off into our own thoughts, Hoja suddenly said I had much changed, that I had finally become a completely different person.

"The Old Woman's Despair"

A wizened little old woman felt gladdened and gay at the sight of the pretty baby that every one was making such a fuss over, and that every one wanted to please; such a pretty little creature, as frail as the old woman herself, and toothless and hairless like her.

She went up to him all nods and smiles.

But the infant, terrified, struggled to get away from her caresses, filling the house with his howls.

Then the old woman went back into her eternal solitude and wept alone, saying: "Ah, for us miserable old females, the age of pleasing is past. Even innocent babes cannot endure us, and we are scarecrows to little children whom we long to love."

From Part 3 - Antoinette has become Bertha Mason (from Jane Eyre)

There is one window high up- you cannot see out of it. My bed had doors but they have been taken away. There is not much else in the room. Her (Grace Poole's) bed, a black press, the table in the middle and the two black chairs carved with fruit and flowers....Looking at the tapestry one day I recognized my mother dressed in an evening gown but with bare feet. She looked away from me, over my head just as she used to do. I woudn't tell Grace this. Her name oughtn't be Grace. Names matter, like when he (Mr. Rochestor) wouldn't call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette driftng out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass.....

All the people who had been staying in the house had gone, for the bedroom doors were shut, but it seemed to me that someone was following me, someone was chasing me, laughing. Sometimes I looked to the right or to the left but I never looked behind me for I did not want to see that ghost of a woman who they say haunts this place.

Stephen's name was called. He hurried down the steps of the theatre so as to be as far away from the vision as he could be and, peering closely at his father's initials, hid his flushed face.

But the word and the vision capered before his eyes as he walked back across the quadrangle and towards the college gate. It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind. His monstrous reveries came thronging into his memory. They too had sprun up before him, suddenly and furiously, out of mere words. He had soon given into them, and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intellect, wondering always where they came from, from what den of monstrous images, and always weak and humble towards others, resltless and sickened of himself when they had swept over him.

"You mean that record has been up there the whole time we've been at Devon and nobody's busted it yet?" It was an insult to the class, and Finny had tremendous loyalty to the class, as he did to any group he belonged to, beginning with him and me and radiating outward past the limits of humanity toward spirits and clouds and stars.

No one else happened to be in the pool. Around us gleamed white tile and glass brick; the green, artificial-looking water rocked gently in its shining basin, releasing vague chemical smells and a sense of many pipes and filters; even Finny's voice, trapped in this closed, high-ceilinged room, lost its special resonance and blurred into a general well of noise gathered up toward the ceiling. He said blurringly, "I have a feeling I can swim faster than A. Hopkins Parker."

We found a stop watch in the office. He mounted a starting box, leaned forward from the waist as he had seen racing swimmers do but never had occasion to do himself - I noticed a preparatory looseness coming into his shoulders and arms, a controlled ease about his stance which was unexpected in anyone trying to break a record. I said, "On your mark -- Go!" There was a complex moment when his body uncoiled and shot forward with sudden metallic tension. He planed up the pool, his shoulders dominating the water while his legs and feet rode so low that I couldn't distinguish them; a wake rippled hurriedly by him and then at the end of the pool his position broke, he relaxed, dived, an instant's confusion and then his suddenly and metallically tense body shot back toward the other end of the pool. Another turn and up the pool again - I noticed no particular slackening of his pace - another turn, down the pool again, his hand touched the end, and he looked up at me with a composed, interested expression. "Well, how did I do?" I looked at the watch; he had broken A. Hopkins Parker's record by .7 seconds.

"My God! So I really did it. You know what? I thought I was going to do it. It felt as though I had that stop watch in my head and I could hear myself going just a little bit faster than A. Hopkins Parker."

"The worst thing is there weren't any witnesses. And I'm no official timekeeper. I don't think it will count."

"Well of course it won't count."

"You can try it again and break it again. Tomorrow. We'll get the coach in here, and all the official timekeepers and I'll call up The Devonian to send a reporter and a photographer --"

He climbed out of the pool. "I'm not going to do it again," he said quietly.

"Of course you are!"

"No, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I know. But I don't want to do it in public." Some other swimmers drifted in through the door. Finny glanced sharply at them. "By the way," he said in an even more subdued voice, "we aren't going to talk about this. It's just between you and me. Don't say anything about it, to ... anyone."

"Not say anything about it! When you broke the school record!"

"Sh-h-h-h-h!" He shot a blazing, agitated glance at me.

I stopped and looked at him up and down. He didn't look directly back at me. "You're too good to be true," I said after a while.