coarsen in Canada'; on the wedding morning, he thinks, 'the four young sons jiggled in excitement among the cherubim.'" Feminism Hoogland reads Lois's character in an intriguing feminist context. She believes that Lois fails to fall in love completely with Gerald because she sees the futility of marriage around her: By adopting their prescribed role in the social contract, Lois’s friends [Livvy and Viola] not only conform to but in effect reinforce the regimes of compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism subtending it. Despite her need to be recognized, to "be in a pattern", our heroine is incapable of such a wholehearted embrace of her assigned place within the established power/knowledge system. Sensing the aridity of marriages around her, Lois astutely discerns the limitations imposed on the individual spouses by the institution of heterosexuality itself. Wanting no part of that, she can alleviate her fear of being "locked out" by the elder generation by deriving a "feeling of mysteriousness and destination" from the thought she will "penetrate thirty years deeper ahead into Time than they could". She cannot so easily afford to distance herself from her peers, however. Succeeding the now "lost" leading elders, Viola and Livvy are the others on which Lois depends for confirmation of her precarious sense of self. Her conscious reservation notwithstanding, she feels compelled to follow them in trying to be a "pleasant young person", which, she has learned, entails being "attractive to a number of young men". She therefore hesitatingly accepts Gerald Lesworth's persistent attentions. Lady Naylor insists that "these early marriages ruin careers, and engagements are nearly as bad". She also believes: "There's a future for girls nowadays outside marriage…Careers –." Despite her intentions in dissuading Lois from marrying Gerald, there is a message of women's empowerment not to adhere to "the institution of heterosexuality", if we use Hoogland's phrase cited above. Motifs Ellipsis The ultimate example of ellipsis of the novel is the mill scene in which Marda Norton is shot. Corcoran explains the function and effect of ellipsis in the novel: The ruined mill is, as it were, the terrible secret of Anglo-Irish history still architecturally articulate on the land, even in its desolation; and Hugo begins to elaborate something like this before he is prevented by yet one more elision: "'Another', Hugo declared, 'of our national grievances. English law strangled the –' But Lois insisted on hurrying: she and Marda were now