Clarinda has just got engaged to Dudley and has to go and meet his family in the English countryside. She gradually discovers the rituals of Dudley’s family and becomes very bored. So she goes out for a walk and from then on, everything gets really weird, with a maze, a strange child and people dressed in furs. Fun.
“Little of this, however, had much immediate significance for Clarinda; because all over the maze, under the moon, writhed and slithered and sprawled the smooth white bodies of men and women. There were scores of them; all apparently well-shaped and comely; all (perhaps for that reason) weirdly impersonal; all recumbent and reptilian, as in a picture Clarinda remembered having seen; all completely and impossibly silent beneath the silent night. Clarinda saw that all round the maze were heaps of furry skins. She then noticed that the heads of all the women were bound in black fillets.”