The human tendency for the mind to ‘wander’ in the small hours of the

night as the imaginative powers are let loose, and each character
seems haunted, is to the fore in this passage. Lindsay’s use of the
present tense highlights this as the author notes, ‘it is the sunset … it is
the afternoon of the picnic’. Just as the watches once stopped at
midday so, too, have these characters ‘stopped’ in time, unable to move
forward except into new and ever more bizarre fantasies, while the past
seems omnipresent to each of them. Despite its link to the delights of
the natural world, here the key word ‘flowerings’ implies rather the
‘breed [ing]’ of foul noxious odours, a psychic miasma permeating the
College.

Moreover, the shifting authorial voice of Lindsay veers at this point

from that of omniscient author to a playful, whimsical stance as though
she is as equally baffled as her readers. Speculating as to what the
‘plump little Empress of India’ might be doing at this time of night
reduces the might and power of the British empire to a rather pathetic
figure in a ‘flannel nightdress’. At the same time that ‘purse [d]’ little
mouth speaks of its repressive power, while the body of her self-
proclaimed representative in the colonies begins to decay. The strict
regimen of Mrs Appleyard is beginning to fall apart, captured in the
bleak image of the ‘suet grey mask’. The mask of ‘British’ manners and
decorum is failing her as the rock intrudes upon her at night, and as the
dreadful ‘flowerings’ of the imagination take hold.