“In her once familiar street as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs. Drover’s return.”

Bowen shows that the unfamiliarity of the street is due to its abandonment during the blitz. Although the reference “no human eye” may refer to the gaze of the cat just mentioned, it also hints at the supernatural nature of the (possible) visitation from Mrs. Drover’s former fiancé.

Now the prosaic woman, looking around her, was more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw, by her long former habit of life—the yellow smoke stain up the white marble mantelpiece, the ring left by a vase on top of the escritoire; the bruise in the wallpaper where, on the door being thrown open widely, the china handle had always hit the wall.”

Even the placement of household items takes on an eerie note of absence that causes Mrs. Drover to feel puzzled and out of place; she sees the lingering traces of objects rather than the objects themselves. This state helps heighten the strangeness of the letter—another trace of the past—when it appears. Mrs. Drover is described as “prosaic,” or ordinary, so extraordinary things rarely happen to her.

“Her reluctance to look again at the letter came from the fact that she felt intruded upon—and by someone contemptuous of her ways.”

Even before she opens it, Mrs. Drover has misgivings about the letter. The unopened letter is disruptive, and she sees the letter writer as someone who doesn’t respect her current life (if they did, she believes they would know she is in the country). Part of her subsequent feeling of threat—that the letter writer intends to harm her—emerges in this sentence.