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She looked towards the house—the old ark that had so long stood high and dry; now, it seemed to her, the water had reached the windows of the lowest story—soon it would be afloat, carrying them all ... no, not her father. He, she was sure, was still—would always be—outside of Time.

But Concha—Concha was there as much as she herself.

Why did she mind in Concha the same intellectual insincerities and pretensions, the same airs and graces, that she had loved in Pepa?

She smiled tenderly as she remembered how once at school she had opened Pepa’s Oxford Book of English Verse at the fly-leaf and found on it, in a “leggy,” unfledged hand, the following inscription: “To Josepha Lane, from her father,” and underneath, an extract from Cicero’s famous period in praise of letters—et haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, and so on. (That term Pepa’s form had been reading the Pro Archia.)

Teresa had gone to her and asked her what it meant.

“Dad would never have written that—besides, it’s in your writing.”