He picked himself up, swearing viciously, rather pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.
She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter.

She was beginning by now to realise that they would not.

She seemed so far away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly up the breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.
"What have I to do with it ?" she said to herself.

"What have I to do with all this?
Even the child I am going to have! It doesn't seem as if I were taken into account." Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
"I wait," Mrs.Morel said to herself--"I wait, and what I wait for can never come." Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire, looked out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak.

After which she sat down to her sewing.