Returning to What Was — North and South

The long chapter of return and revisiting. Margaret moves through a social world that is continuing with its ordinary business, renovation and improvement, children and households, while she carries the accumulated weight of the losses of the last several chapters. The epigraph's acknowledgement that revisiting the past requires confronting the absence of those no longer in it sets the chapter's key. Oxford and Bell are present in the chapter as absence: Margaret recognises that she could not face another Oxford visit of the kind she made with Bell, because Bell's death has made Oxford primarily a record of his absence rather than a place she can simply return to. The relationship between places and the people associated with them is one of the chapter's governing concerns. Small declarative sentences hold the most weight: 'We were but two.' The smallness of the number and all that has happened to it since the Hales left Helstone is registered without elaboration. The chapter moves through multiple social encounters with the care of someone who is managing the ordinary world while also carrying something that does not quite fit inside it.