In this passage from Katherine Mansfield's 1922 short story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” sisters Josephine and Constantia are…

But at that moment in the street below a barrel-organ struck up. Josephine and Constantia sprang to their feet together.

“Run, Con,” said Josephine. “Run quickly. There's sixpence on the...”

Then they remembered. It didn't matter. They would never have to stop the organ-grinder again. Never again would she and Constantia be told to make that monkey take his noise somewhere else. Never would sound that loud, strange bellow when father thought they were not hurrying enough. The organ-grinder might play there all day and the stick would not thump.

It never will thump again,
It never will thump again,

played the barrel-organ.

What was Constantia thinking? She had such a strange smile; she looked different. She couldn't be going to cry.

“Jug, Jug,” said Constantia softly, pressing her hands together. “Do you know what day it is? It's Saturday. It's a week to-day, a whole week.”

A week since father died,
A week since father died,

cried the barrel-organ. And Josephine, too, forgot to be practical and sensible; she smiled faintly, strangely. On the Indian carpet there fell a square of sunlight, pale red; it came and went and came, and stayed, deepened, until it shone almost golden.

“The sun's out,” said Josephine, as though it really mattered.

A perfect fountain of bubbling notes shook from the barrel-organ, round, bright notes, carelessly scattered.

Constantia lifted her big, cold hands as if to catch them, and then her hands fell again. She walked over to the mantelpiece to her favourite Buddha. And the stone and gilt image, whose smile always gave her such a queer feeling, almost a pain and yet a pleasant pain, seemed to-day to be more than smiling. He knew something; he had a secret. “I know something that you don't know,” said her Buddha. Oh, what was it, what could it be? And yet she had always felt there was something.

The sunlight pressed through the windows, thieved its way in, flashed its light over the furniture and the photographs. Josephine watched it. When it came to mother's photograph, the enlargement over the piano, it lingered as though puzzled to find so little remained of mother, except the earrings shaped like tiny pagodas and a black feather boa.

If mother had lived, might they have married? But there had been nobody for them to marry. There had been father's Anglo-Indian friends before he quarrelled with them. But after that she and Constantia never met a single man except clergymen. How did one meet men? Or even if they'd met them, how could they have got to know men well enough to be more than strangers?

The rest had been looking after father, and at the same time keeping out of father's way. But now? But now? The thieving sun touched Josephine gently.

She lifted her face. She was drawn over to the window by gentle beams.

Until the barrel-organ stopped playing Constantia stayed before the Buddha, wondering, but not as usual, not vaguely. This time her wonder was like longing. She remembered the times she had come in here, crept out of bed in her nightgown when the moon was full, and lain on the floor with her arms outstretched. Why? The big, pale moon had made her do it.

She remembered too how, whenever they were at the seaside, she had gone off by herself and got as close to the sea as she could, and sung something, something she had made up, while she gazed all over that restless water. There had been this other life, running out, bringing things home in bags, getting things on approval, discussing them with Jug, and taking them back to get more things on approval, and arranging father's trays and trying not to annoy father.

But it all seemed to have happened in a kind of tunnel. It wasn't real. It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now?

She turned away from the Buddha with one of her vague gestures. She went over to where Josephine was standing. She wanted to say something to Josephine, something frightfully important, about the future and what....

“Don't you think perhaps...” she began.

But Josephine interrupted her. “I was wondering if now...” she murmured. They stopped; they waited for each other.

“Go on, Con,” said Josephine.

“No, no, Jug; after you,” said Constantia.

“No, say what you were going to say. You began,” said Josephine.

“I... I'd rather hear what you were going to say first,” said Constantia.

“Don't be absurd, Con.”

“Really, Jug.”

“Connie!”

“Oh, Jug!”

A pause. Then Constantia said faintly, “I can't say what I was going to say, Jug, because I've forgotten what it was... that I was going to say.”

Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, “I've forgotten too.”