In 1917, T. S. Eliot published “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” a prose dialogue between two figures modelled on caricatures of himself and Ezra Pound. Eeldrop is Eliot:

Eeldrop's test follows from a remark Appleplex makes about Edith: “‘Everyone says of her, “How perfectly impenetrable!” I suspect that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret’” (CP1 530). Eeldrop picks up on Appleplex's “dusty garret,” but he is less explicit about the distinction between what may be within Edith's person and what may be around her; where Appleplex speculates about the kind of room within Edith's person, Eeldrop imagines her placed within a room. The expression “waking to a room” (emphasis added) slightly alters the expected prepositional locution of “waking in a room.” As Eeldrop phrases it, Edith wakes to her setting, as if, say, waking to remorse. The specific moment of regaining consciousness is temporally afloat, as if part of Eeldrop's test is to imagine the act of waking in order to speculate when, and how, a person and the world may come together, but also to show the difficulty of locating any such finite place or time when a sharp distinction might be drawn between a person and the world. Edith wakes to a setting which is itself a threshold in the double aspect of the sunlight beating in and being kept out: the broken blinds recall the shaded peripheries between figures, rooms and worlds in Eliot's “Preludes,” where the “showers beat / On broken blinds,” and where “the world came back / And the light crept up between the shutters” (CPP 22, 23).

“Rooms,” “scenes,” “atmospheres,” “situations” – these words repeatedly play a part in Eliot's early poems and critical prose: “the contact and cross-contact of souls, the breath and scent of the room” (CP1 488).