in front of the window in her room. In a way of course it was all perfectly true, but in another way it was all the greatest rubbish and she didn't mean a word of it. No, that wasn't right. She felt all those things, but she didn't really feel them like that. The Beryl who wrote that letter might have been leaning over her shoulder and guiding her hand—so separate was she: and yet in a way, perhaps she was more real than the other, the real Beryl. She had been getting stronger and stronger for a long while.

There had been a time when the real Beryl had just made use of the false one to get her out of awkward positions—to glide her over hateful moments—to help her to bear the stupid, ugly, PAGE 126 sometimes beastly, things that happened. She had, as it were, called to the unreal Beryl, and seen her coming, and seen her going away again, quite definitely and simply. But that was long ago. The unreal Beryl was greedy and jealous of the real one. Gradually she took more and stayed longer. Gradually she came more quickly, and now the real Beryl was hardly certain sometimes if she were there or not.

Days, weeks at a time passed without her ever for a moment ceasing to act a part, for that was really what it came to, and then, quite suddenly, when the unreal self had forced her to do something she did not want to do at all, she had come into her own again, and for the first time realised what had been happening.

Perhaps it was because she was not leading the life that she wanted to—she had not a chance to really express herself—she was always living below her power, and therefore she had no need of her real self, her real self only made her wretched.

At this point in the manuscript the following note occurs:

What is it that I'm getting at? It is really Beryl's Sosie. The fact that for a long time now, she hasn't been even able to control her second self: it's her second self who now controls her…. There was a kind of radiant being who wasn't either spiteful or malicious, of whom she'd had a glimpse—whose very PAGE 127 voice was different to hers—who was grave—who never would have dreamed of doing the things that she did. Had she banished this being, or had it really got simply tired and left her? I want to get at all this through her, just as