Itselfcircumambient and enclosed by its effluvium of hell, its aura ofunregeneration, it mused (mused, thought, seemed to possess sentience, as if,though dispossessed of the peace — who was impervious anyhow to fatigue — which shedeclined to give it, it was still irrevocably outside the scope of her hurt orharm) with that quality peaceful and now harmless and not even very attentive — theogre-shape which, as Miss Coldfield's voice went on, resolved out of itselfbefore Quentin's eyes the two half-ogre children, the three of them forming ashadowy background for the fourth one. This was the mother, the dead sisterEllen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind ofnightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved butwithout weeping, who — now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, notis if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she hadnever lived at all. Quentin seemed to see them, the four of them arrangedinto-the conventional family group of the period, with formal and lifelessdecorum, and seen now as the fading and ancient photograph itself would havebeen seen enlarged and hung on the wall behind and above the voice and of whosepresence there the voice's owner was not even aware, as if she (Miss Coldfield)had never seen this room before — a picture, a group which even to Quentin had aquality strange, contradictory, and bizarre; not quite comprehensible, not(even to twenty) quite right — a group the last member of which had been deadtwenty-five years and the first, fifty, evoked now out of the airless gloom of