'These things take so long! But everybody's doing their best.' And she had grasped Nelly's cold hands in hers, long and pityingly.

Her own fine aquiline face seemed to have grown thinner and more strained even since Nelly had known it.

She often worked in the office, she said, up to midnight.
All these recollections and passing visualisations of words and faces, drawn from those busy rooms a few streets off, in which not only George Sarratt's fate, but her own, as it often seemed to Nelly, were being slowly and inexorably decided, passed endlessly through her brain, as she mechanically took off her things, and brushed her hair.
Presently she was following Bridget across the hall to the drawing-room.
Bridget seemed already to know all about the flat.

'The dining-room opens out of the drawing-room.

It's all Japanese,' she said complaisantly, turning back to her sister.