Roderick looks "more like himself"  in Robert's dressing gown. Robert believes in fascism because he thinks people can’t handle freedom. Roderick eagerly accepts his destiny to be a landowner at Mount Morris, and Stella is relieved that her son has such a script laid out for him rather than being free to be nothing. Both come from houses that affect them negatively: Cousin Nettie from Mount Morris, where generations of Anglo-Irish women went mad or nearly mad, and Robert from Holme Dene, a "man eating house." Both live duplicitous lives, Robert as a German spy in London and Cousin Nettie as a sane woman who feigns insanity. Both are trying to establish gender identities by rejecting certain gender roles. Robert is not honouring his fatherland and running a household, but he tells Stella that being a spy in secret makes him a man again, meaning that he is a man, but only in secret. Cousin Nettie tries and fails to be a proper wife to Francis, and only is able to settle down and establish her own domestic space by feigning madness and leaving her married house for good. Time is essential in the novel and its presence is manifested in a variety of ways. As the general temporal location of events, the present is determined by the eruption of the war in the lives of the characters and is understood, in that context, as a rupture between the past and the future: "vacuum as to future was offset by vacuum as to past." Time also appears foregrounded in an existential sense, particularly in relation to Stella and Roderick. Stella is constantly conflicted by "the fatal connection between the past and the future having broken before her time. It had been Stella, her generation, who had broken the link". Once he learns he will inherit Mount Morris, Roderick appears often planning, discussing or simply musing over his own future at the house. Finally, the novel closes with a projection into the future after Louie's son is born and the war is over: "the projected English future and the rejected Irish future [are] both figured as pacific in the repeated figure of the three swans." Finally, time is foregrounded in the materialisation of daily life events. Characters are usually pressed for time in the streets and, particularly for those involved in espionage and plotting activities, every minute is essential. Consequently, we may find several passages in which a number of characters (Stella, Harrison, Louie and Roderick among others) express their reluctance to waste their time or are heard discussing that concept.