Honeycomb

7

“It comes perfectly into line with Biblical records, my dear Corrie: a single couple, two cells originating the whole creation.”

“I’m maintaining that’s not the Darwinian idea at all. It was not a single couple, but several different ones.”

“We’re not descended from monkeys at all. It’s not natural,” said Mrs. Craven loudly, across the irritated voices of the men. Their faces were red. They filled the room with inaccurate phrases pausing politely between each and keeping up a show of being guest and host. How nice of them. But this was how cultured people with incomes talked about Darwin.

“The great thing Darwin did,” said Miriam abruptly, “was to point out the power of environment in evolving the different species—selecting.”

“That’s it, that’s it!” sang Mrs. Corrie. “Let’s all select ourselves into the droin’-room.” “Now I’ve offended the men and the women too,” thought Miriam.

8

Mr. Staple-Craven joined the ladies almost at once. He came in leaving the door open behind him and took a chair in the centre of the fireside circle and sat giving little gasps and sighs of satisfaction, spreading his hands and making little remarks about the colours of the fire, and the shape of the coffee cups. There he was and he would have to be entertained, although he had nothing at all to say and was puzzling about himself and life all the time behind his involuntary movements and polite smiles and gestures. Perhaps he was uneasy because he knew there was someone saying all the time, “You’re a silly pompous old man and you think yourself much cleverer than you are.” But it was not altogether that; he was always uneasy, even when he was alone, unless he was rapidly preparing to go and be with people who did not know what he was. If he had been alone with the other three women he would have forgotten for a while and half-liked, half-despised them for their affability.

“The great man’s always at work, always at work,” he said suddenly, in a desperate sort of way. They were like some sort of needlework guild sitting round, just people, in the end; it made the surroundings seem quite ordinary. The room fell to pieces; one could imagine it being turned out, or all the things being sold up and dispersed.

“All work and no play,” scolded Mrs. Craven, “makes Jack....”

Miriam heard the swish of the bead curtain at the end of the short passage.

“Heah he is,” smiled Joey.

“A miracle,” breathed Mrs. Craven, glancing round the circle. Evidently he did not usually come in.

Mr. Corrie came quietly into the room with empty hands; in the clear light he looked older than he had done in the dining-room, fuller in the face; grey threads showed in his hair. Everyone turned towards him. He looked at no one. His loose little smile had gone. The straight chair into which he dropped with a dreamy careless preoccupied air was set a little back from the fireside circle. No one moved.

“Absorbed the evidence, m’lud?” squeaked Mr. Craven.

“Ah-m,” growled his host, clearing his throat.

Why can’t they let him alone, Miriam asked herself, and leave him to me, added her mind swiftly. She sat glaring into the fire; the room had resumed its strange magic.

9

“Do you think it is wrong to teach children things you don’t believe yourself?...” said Miriam, and her thoughts rushed on. “You’re an unbeliever and I’m an unbeliever and both of us despise the thoughts and opinions of ‘people’; you’re a successful wealthy man and can amuse yourself and forget; I must teach and presently die, teach till I die. It doesn’t matter. I can be happy for a while teaching your children, but you know, knowing me a little what a task that must be; you know I know nothing and that I know that nobody knows anything; comfort me....”

She seemed to traverse a great loop of time waiting for the answer to her hurried question. Mr. Corrie had come into the drawing-room dressed for dinner and sat down near her with a half-smile as she closed the book she was reading and laid it on her knee and looked up with sentences from “A Human Document” ringing through her, and by the time her question was out she knew it was unnecessary. But she had flung it out and it had reached him and he had read the rush of thoughts that followed it. She might as well have been silent; better. She had missed some sort of opportunity. What would have happened if she had been quite silent? His answer was swift, but in the interval they had said all they would ever have to say to each other. “Not in the least,” he said, with a gentle decisiveness.

She flashed thanks at him and sighed her relief. He did not mind about religion. But how far did he understand? She had made him think she was earnest about the teaching children something. He would be very serious about their being “decently turned out.” She was utterly incapable of turning them out for the lives they would have to lead. She envied and pitied and despised those lives. Envied the ease and despised the ignorance, the awful cruel struggle of society that they were growing up for—no joy, a career and sport for the boy, clubs, the weary dyspeptic life of the blasé man, and for the girl lonely cold hard bitter everlasting “social” life. She envied the ease. Mr. Corrie must know she envied the ease. Did he know that she tried to hide her incapacity in order to go on sharing the beauty and ease?

“It is so difficult,” she pursued helplessly, and saw him wonder why she went on with the subject and try to read the title of her book. She did not mean to tell him that. That would lead them away; just nowhere. If only she could tell him everything and get him to understand. But that would mean admitting that she was letting the children’s education slide; and he was sitting there, confidently, so beautifully dressed for dinner, paying her forty pounds a year not to let the children’s education slide.... “It’s an opportunity; he’s come in here, and sat down to talk to me. I ought to tell him; I’m cheating.” But he had looked for the title of her book, and would have talked, about anything, if she could have talked. He had a little air of deference, quiet kind indulgent deference. His neat little shoulders, bent as he sat turned towards her, were kind. “I’m too young,” she cried in her mind. If only she could say aloud, “I’m too young—I can’t do it,” and leave everything to him.

Or leave the children out altogether and talk to him, man to man, about the book. She could not do that. Everything she said would hurt her, poisoned by the hidden sore of her incapability to do anything for his children. He ought to send them to school. But they would not go to a school where anything real was taught. Science, strange things about India and Ireland, the æsthetic movement, Ruskin; making things beautiful. How far away all that seemed, that sacred life of her old school—forgotten. The thought of it was like a breath in the room. Did he know of these things? That sort of school would take the children away, out of this kind of society life. Make them think—for themselves. He did not think or approve of thought. Even the hard Banbury Park people would be nearer to him than any of those things.... That was the world. Nearly everyone seemed to be in it. He was whimsically trying to read the title of her book with the little half-smile he shared with the boy.

People came in and they both rose. It was over. She sank back miserably into the offering of the moment, retiring into a lamp-lit corner with her book, enclosing herself in its promise.

10

She sat long that night over her fire dipping into the strange book, reading passages here and there; feeling them come nearer to her than anything she had read before. She knew at once that she did not want to read the book through; that it was what people called a tragedy, that the author had deliberately made it a tragedy; something black and twisted and painful, painful came to her out of every page; but seriously to read it right through and be excited about the tragic story seemed silly and pitiful. The thought of Mrs. Corrie and Joey doing this annoyed her and impatiently she wanted to tell them that there was nothing in it, nothing in the things the author wanted to make them believe; that was fraud, humbug ... they missed everything. They could not see through it, they read through to the happy ending or the sad ending and took it all seriously.

She struggled in thought to discover why it was she felt that these people did not read books and that she herself did. She felt that she could look at the end, and read here and there a little and know; know something, something they did not know. People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all? It was a sort of trick, a sell. Like a puzzle that was no more fun when you had found it out. There was something more in books than that ... even Rosa Nouchette Carey and Mrs. Hungerford, something that came to you out of the book, any bit of it, a page, even a sentence—and the “stronger” the author was the more came. That was why Ouida put those others in the shade, not, not, not because her books were improper. It was her, herself somehow. Then you read books to find the author! That was it. That was the difference ... that was how one was different from most people.... Dear Eve; I have just discovered that I don’t read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author ... she must write that to Eve at once; to-morrow. It was rather awful and strange. It meant never being able to agree with people about books, never liking them for the same reasons as other people.... But it was true and exciting. It meant ... things coming to you out of books, people, not the people in the books, but knowing, absolutely, everything about the author. She clung to the volume in her hand with a sense of wealth. Its very binding, the feeling of it, the sight of the slender serried edges of the closed leaves came to her as having a sacredness ... and the world was full of books.... It did not matter that people went about talking about nice books, interesting books, sad books, “stories”—they would never be that to her. They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word.

Why did this strange book come so near, nearer than any others, so that you felt the writing, felt the sentences as if you were writing them yourself? He was a sad pained man, all wrong; bothered and tragic about things, believing in sad black horror. Then why did he come so near? Perhaps because life was sad. Perhaps life was really sad. No; it was somehow the writing, the clearness. That was the thing. He himself must be all right, if he was so clear. Then it was dangerous, dangerous to people like Mrs. Corrie and Joey who would attend only to what he said, and not to him ... sadness or gladness, saying things were sad or glad did not matter; there was something behind all the time, something inside people. That was why it was impossible to pretend to sympathise with people. You don’t have to sympathise with authors; you just get at them, neither happy nor sad; like talking, more than talking. Then that was why the people who wrote moral stories were so awful. They were standing behind the pages preaching at you with smarmy voices.... Bunyan?... No.... He preached to himself too ... crying out his sins.... He did not get between you and himself and point at a moral. An author must show himself. Anyhow, he can’t help showing himself. A moral writer only sees the mote in his brother’s eye. And you see him seeing it.

11

A long letter to Eve.... Eve would think that she was showing off. But she would be excited and interested too, and would think about it a little. If only she could make Eve see what a book was ... a dance by the author, a song, a prayer, an important sermon, a message. Books were not stories printed on paper, they were people; the real people; ... “I prefer books to people” ... “I know now why I prefer books to people.”

12

“... I do wish you’d tell me more about your extraordinary days. You must have extraordinary days. I do. Perhaps everyone has. Only they don’t seem to know it!”

... This morning, the green common lying under the sun, still and wide and silent; with a little breeze puffing over it; the intense fresh green near the open door of the little Catholic church; the sandy pathway running up into the common, hummocky and twisting and winding, its sand particles glinting in the sun, always there, going on, whoever died or whatever happened, winding amongst happy greenery, in and out amongst the fresh smell of the common. Inside the chapel the incense streaming softly up, the seven little red lamps hanging in the cloud of incense about the altar; the moving of the thick forest of embroidery on the cope of the priest. Funny when he bobbed, but when he just moved quietly, taking a necessary step, all the colour of the forest on his cope moving against the still high wide colours of the chancel. If only anyone could express how perfect life was at those moments; everyone must know, everyone who was looking must know that life was perfectly happy. That is why people went to church; for those moments with the light on all those things in the chancel. It meant something.... Priests and nuns knew it all the time; even when they were unhappy; that was why they could kiss dying people and lepers; they saw something else, all the time. Nothing common or unclean. That was why Christ had blazing eyes. Christianity: the sanctification of bread and wine, and lepers and death; the body; the resurrection of the body. Even if there was some confusion and squabbling about Christ there must be something in it if the things that showed were so beautiful.

Hard cold vows, of chastity and poverty. That did it. Emptiness, in face of—an unspeakable glory. If one could not, was too weak or proud, “Verily they have their reward.” Everyone got something somehow ... in hell; thou art there also ... that shows there is no eternal punishment. Earth is hell, with everyone going to heaven.

What was the worldly life? The gay bright shimmering lunch, the many guests, the glitter of the table, mayonnaise red and green and yellow, delicate bright wines; strolling in the woods in the afternoon.... Tea, everyone telling anecdotes of the afternoon’s walk as if it were a sort of competition, great bursts of laughter and abrupt silences and then another story, the moments of laughter were something like those moments in church; whilst there was nothing but laughter in the room everybody was perfectly happy and good; everybody forgot everything and ran back somewhere; to the beginning, to the time when they were first looking at things, without troubling about anything. But when the laughter ceased everyone ran away and the rest of their day together showed in a flash, an awful tunnel that would be filled with the echo of the separate footsteps unless more laughter could be made, to hide the sad helpless sounds. Dinners were like all the noise and laughter of tea-time grown steadier, a pillow fight with harder whacks and more time for the strokes, no bitterness, just buffeting and shouts, and everyone laughing the same laugh as if they were all in some high secret. They were in some high secret; the great secret of the worldly life; and if you prevented yourself from thinking and laughed, they seemed to take you in. That was the way to live the worldly life. To talk absurdly and laugh; to be lost in laughter. Why had Mrs. Corrie seemed so vexed? Why had she said suddenly and quietly in the billiard-room that it seemed rummy to go to Mass and play billiards in the evening? “Be goody if you are.” It had spoiled the day. Mrs. Corrie would like her to be goody. But then it was she who had pushed her down the steps in the afternoon and called after the actor to take care of her in the woods.

There was something too sad about the worldliness and too difficult about goodness.

Perhaps one had not gone far enough with worldliness....

That was what she had done drifting about in the wood with the actor listening to his pleasant voice. It was an excursion into pure worldliness. He had never thought for a moment in his life of the world as anything than what it appeared to be. He had no suspicion that anyone ever did. He had accepted her as one of the house-party and talked, on and on busily, about his American tour and his hope of a London engagement, getting emphatic about his chance, the chanciness of everything. And she had drifted along, delighting in the pleasant voice sounding through the wood, seeing the wood clear and steady through the pleasant tone, not caring about chance or chanciness but ready to pretend she was interested in them so that the voice might go on; pretending to be interested when he stopped. That was feminine worldliness, pretending to be interested so that pleasant things might go on. Masculine worldliness was refusing to be interested so that it might go on doing things. Feminine worldliness then meant perpetual hard work and cheating and pretence at the door of a hidden garden, a lovely hidden garden. Masculine worldliness meant never being really there; always talking about things that had happened or making plans for things that might happen. There was nothing that could happen that was not in some way the same as anything else. Nobody was ever quite there, realising.

CHAPTER IV

1

During her second week of giving the children their morning’s lessons Miriam saw finally that it was impossible and would always be impossible to make their two hours of application anything but an irrelevant interval in their lives. They came into the schoolroom with languid reluctance, dreamily indolent from breakfast in bed, fragrant from warm baths. They made no resistance. She sat with the appointed tasks clearly in mind, holding on to the certainty that they were to be done as the only means of getting through the morning. The excitement of taking up everything afresh with her was over and beyond occasional moments of brightness when she tried to impress a fact or lift them over a difficulty with a jest and they would exchange their glance of secret delight, their curious conspirators’ glance of some great certainty shared, they went through their tasks with well-bred preoccupation, sighing deeply now and again and sometimes groaning, with clenched hands pressed between their knees. Their accustomed life of events was close round them, in the garden just beyond the undraped window, on the mat outside the schoolroom door, where at any moment a footstep crossing the landing might fall softly and pause, when their heads would go up in tense listening. “Rollo!” they would say, waiting for the turning of the handle, holding themselves in for the subdued shoutings they would utter when Mrs. Corrie appeared standing in the doorway with a finger on her lips. “Happy?” she would breathe; “working like nigger boys?” Unless Miriam looked gravely detached she would glide in blushing, and passionately caress them. When this happened, sighs and groanings filled the time that remained. Their nearest approach to open rebellion included a tacit appeal to her as a fellow-sufferer to throw up the stupid game. It was quite clear that they did not blame her for their sufferings and they were so much prepared to do the decent thing that her experiment of reading to them regularly at some convenient half-hour each day from a book of adventures or fairy tale, not only reconciled them to endure the morning’s ordeal, but filled them with a gratitude that astonished her and the beginnings of a personal regard for her that shook her heart. During the readings they would lose their air of well-bred detachment and would come near. They would be relaxed and silent; the girl with bent head and brooding defiant curiously smiling and frowning face, the boy gazing at the reader, rapturous. She would sometimes feel against each arm the pressure of a head.

She had felt instinctively and at once that she could not use their lesson hours as opportunities for talking at large on general ideas as she had done with the children in the Banbury Park school. Those children, the children of tradesmen most of them, could be allowed to take up the beginnings of ideas; “ideals,” the sense of modern reforms, they could be allowed to discuss anything from any point of view and take up attitudes and have opinions. The opportunity for discussion and for encouraging a definite attitude towards life was much greater in this quiet room with only the two children; but it would have been mean, Miriam felt, to take advantage of this opportunity; to be anything but strictly neutral and wary of generalisations. It would have been so easy. Probably a really “conscientious” woman would have done it, have “influenced” them, given the girl a bias in the direction of some life of devotion, hospital nursing or slum missionary work, and have filled the boy with ideas as to the essential superiority of “Radicals.” Their minds were so soft and untouched.... It ended in a conspiracy, they all sat masquerading, and finished their morning exhausted and relieved. The children knew the lessons tortured her and made her ill at ease, and they were puzzled without disapproving. Through it all she felt their gratitude to her for not being “simple,” like Bunnikin.

2

There was to be another week-end. Again there would be the sense of being a visitor amongst other visitors; visitor was not the word; there was a French word which described the thing, “convive,” “les convives” ... people sitting easily about a table with flushed faces ... someone standing drunkenly up with eyes blazing with friendliness and a raised wineglass ... women and wine, the roses of Heliogabalus; but he was a Greek and dreadful in some way, convives were Latin, Roman; fountains, water flowing over marble, white-robed strong-faced people reclining on marble couches, feasting ... taking each fair mask for what it shows itself; that was what this kind of wealthy English people did, perhaps what all wealthy people did ... the maimed, the halt, the blind, compel them to come in ... but that was after the others had refused. The thing that made you feel jolliest and strongest was to forget the maimed, to be a fair mask, to keep everything else out and be a little circle of people knowing that everything was kept out. Suppose a skeleton walked in? Offer it a glass of wine. People have no right to be skeletons, or if they are to make a fuss about it. These people would be all the brighter if they happened to have neuralgia; some strong pain or emotion made you able to do things. Taking each fair mask was a fine grown-up game. Perhaps it could be kept up to the end? Perhaps that was the meaning of the man playing cards on his death-bed. Defying God. That was what Satan did. He was brave; defying a tyrant ... “nothing to do but curse God and die.” Who said that? there was something silly about it; giving in, not real defiance. It didn’t settle anything; if the new ideas were true; the thing went on. The love of God was like the love of a mother; always forgiving you, ready to die for you, always waiting for you to be good. Why? It was mean. The things one wanted one could not have if one were just tame and good.... It is morbid to think about being good; better the fair mask—anything. But it did not make people happy. These people were not happy. They were not real.

3

Spring; everywhere, inside and outside the house. The spring outside had a meaning here. It came in through the windows without obstruction and passed into everything. At home it had sent one nearly mad with joy and anticipation and passed and left you looking for it for the rest of the year; in Germany it had brought music and wild joy—the secret had passed from eye to eye; all the girls had known it. At Wordsworth House it had stood far away, like a picture in a dream, something that could be seen from windows, and found for a moment in the park, but powerless to get into the house. Here it came in; you could not forget it for a moment; and it was a background for something more wonderful than itself; something that made it wonderful; something there were no words for; voices, movements from room to room, strange food, the soft chink of Venetian glass, amber wine, the light drowned in wine, through the window a sharp gleam on things that reflected, day and night, into everything, even into one’s thoughts. Why was the spring suddenly so real? Why was it that you could stand as it were in a shaft of it all the time, feeling in your breathing, hearing in your voice the sound of the spring, the blood in your fingertips seeming like the roses that they would touch soon in the garden?

How ignorant the man was who said, “each fair mask for what it shows itself.” Life is not a mask, it is fair; the gold in one’s hair is real.

4

Friday brought an atmosphere of expectation. Mr. Kronen, an old friend of the Corries, was coming down, with a new Mrs. Kronen.

By the early afternoon the house was full of fragrance; coming downstairs dressed for an errand in the little town two miles away, Miriam saw the hall all pink and saffron with azaleas. Coming across the hall she found a scent in the air that did not come from the azaleas, a sweet familiar syrupy distillation ... the blaze of childhood’s garden was round her again, bright magic flowers in the sunlight, magic flowers, still there, nearer to her than ever in this happy house; she could almost hear the humming of the bees, and flung back the bead curtain with unseeing eyes half expecting some doorway to open on the remembered garden; the scent was overpowering ... the drawing-room was cool and silent with closed windows and drawn blinds; bowls of roses stood in every available place; she tiptoed about in the room gathering their scent.

As she opened the hall door Mrs. Corrie’s voice startled her from the dining-room.

Going into the dining-room she found her with a flushed face and excited eyes and the children dancing round her. “Another tin! One more tin!” they exclaimed, plucking at Miriam. From the billiard-room came the smell of fresh varnish. Wiggerson was on her knees near the door.

“She’s done some stupid thing,” thought Miriam, looking at Mrs. Corrie’s excited, unconscious face with sudden anxiety; “some womanish overdoing it, wanting to do too much and spoiling everything.” She felt as if she were representing Mr. Corrie.

“Will it be dry in time?” she asked, half angrily, scarcely knowing what she said and in the midst of Mrs. Corrie’s apologetic petition that she would bring a tin of oak stain back with her.

“Lordy, don’t you think so?” whispered Mrs. Corrie, only half dismayed.

Miriam had not patience to follow her as she went to survey the floor ruefully chanting, “Oh, Wiggerson, Wiggerson.”

“Anyhow I’m sure it oughtn’t to have any more on as late as when I come back,” she scolded boldly. How annoyed Mr. Corrie would be....

5

As she was going down the quiet road past the high oak garden palings of the nearest house she heard the bumping and scrabbling of a heavy body against the palings and a dog leapt into the road almost at her feet, making the dust fly. It was an Irish terrier. It smiled and barked a little, waiting, looking up into her face and up and down the road. “It thought it knew me,” she pondered; “it mistook me for someone else.” She patted its head and went forward thinking of the joyful scrabbling, its headlong determination. The dog jerked back its head with a wide smile, tore down the road and came back leaping and smiling. Something disappeared from the vista of the roadway as the dog rushed along it nosing after scents, looking round now and again, and now and again rushing back to greet her. It brought back the sense of the house and the strange gay life she had just left to go on her errand to the little unknown town. It wore a smart collar; it belonged to that life. People in it were never alone; when they went out there was always a dog with them. “It thinks I’m one of them.” But it liked the wild; when they came out on to the common it rushed up a sandy pathway and disappeared amongst the gorse bushes. For a while Miriam hoped it would come back and kept looking about for it; then she gave it up and went ahead with the commons drifting slowly by on either side; she wished that the action of walking were not so jerky, that the expanses on either side might pass more smoothly and easily by: “that’s why people drive,” she thought; “you can only really see the country when you are not moving yourself.” Standing still for a moment she looked across the open stretch to her left and smiled at it and went on again, walking more quickly; the soft beauty that had retreated to the horizon when the dog was with her was spreading back again across the whole expanse and coming towards her; she hurried on singing softly at random, “Scorn such a foe ... though I could fell thee at a blow, though I-i, cou-uld fe-ell thee-ee a-at a-a blow” ... people walking and thinking and fussing, people driving somewhere in victorias were always coming along the road, to them it was a sort of suburb, quite ordinary, the bit near home. But it was big enough to be full of waves and waves of something real, something cool and true and unchanging. Had anybody seen it, did the people who lived there know it? Did anybody know this strange thing? She almost ran; my “commons,” she said. “I know how beautiful you are; if only I knew whether you know that I know. I know, I know,” she said, “I shan’t forget you.” “True, true till death; bear it, oh wind, on thy lightning breath.”

6

The sun was very warm; before she reached the end of the long road the sandy pathways were beginning to glare. There was the river and the little bridge and the first shop just beyond it, where her purchase was to be made. Its wood-work was very bright white; it had a seaside look. She stood still on the slight ascent of the bridge mopping her face and preparing to represent Mrs. Corrie in the shop. Scrambling up the shallow bank from the common came the yellow dog. “Oh, hooray—you duck,” she breathed, patting the warm stubbly head and listening to his breathless snortings. A piano-organ broke into loud music in the little street. It was not a mysterious little town, there was nothing of the village about it. The white framed windows held things you would see in a Regent Street confectioner’s; it was a special shop for the kind of people who lived here. Miriam felt for her three and six and asked for her pound of coffee creams with a bored air, wishing she knew the dog’s name so that she could claim him familiarly. She contented herself with telling him to lie down in an angry whisper repeatedly, as the creams were being weighed. He stood panting and gazing at her wagging his stump. “’Ullo, Bushy,” said the shopwoman languidly; the dog faced round panting more loudly. “There you are, Bush,” she said, as the scales balanced, and flung the dog a chocolate wafer which he caught with a snap. Miriam gazed vaguely at the unfamiliar spectacle, angrily feeling that the shopwoman was observing her. “You’re not going to take him through the town?” said the shopwoman severely.

“Oh, no,” said Miriam nervously.

“He’s the worst fighter in the parish; they never bring him into the town unless it’s the groom sometimes.”

“Thank you,” said Miriam, taking her bag of coffee creams. “Dogs are a nuisance, aren’t they?” she added, in an emphatically sympathetic tone, getting away through the swing door almost hating the yellow body that squeezed through at her side and stood eagerly facing towards the market-place waiting for her movements.

7

She hurried up over the bridge calling to the dog without looking round, listening fearfully for sounds of conflict with a brown collie she had caught sight of standing with head high and ears pricked, twenty yards down the street. The piano-organ jingled angrily. The dog came thoughtfully trotting over the bridge and ambled off across the common—safe. He might have been killed, or killed another dog; how cruel dogs were, without knowing better. She looked to the common asking consolation for her beating heart. The bag of creams was safe and heavy in her hand, the dog had gone, the little town was behind, it had hurt her; it was spoiled; she would never like it. It had done nothing but remind her that she was a helpless dingy little governess. She toiled along, feeling dreadfully tired; the sounds of her boot soles on the firm, sand-powdered road mocked her, telling her she must go on. If she could be quite sure of finding a kind woman, not a hard-featured woman with black and grey hair, like the shopwoman, but kind, knowing and understanding everything, in a large print apron with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, living in a large cottage with a family, who would look at her and smile a quiet short certain smile, as if she had been waiting for her, and take her in and let her help and stay there for ever, she would put down the bag of coffee creams on the edge of the common and go straight across it to her; but there would not be a woman like that here; all that the women round here would think about her would be to wonder which of the families she belonged to. If a victoria came along and in it a delicate, lonely old gentleman who had a large empty house with deep quiet rooms and a large sunny garden with high walls and wanted someone to be about there singing and happy till he died she would go. He would drive away with her and shut her up in the quiet beautiful house, protecting her and keeping people off, and she would sing all day in the garden and the house and play to him and read sometimes aloud, and he would forget he was old and ill, and they would share the great secret, dying of happiness. Die of happiness. People ought to be able to die of happiness if they were able to admit how happy they were. If they admitted it aloud they would pass straight out of their bodies, alive; unhappiness was the same as death, not suffering; but letting suffering make you unhappy—curse God and die, curse life, that was letting life beat you; letting God beat you. God did not want that. No one admitted it. No one seemed to know anything about it. People just went on fussing.

The violent beating of her heart died down. The sun was behind her; the commons glowed. She must have been looking at them for some time because she could close her eyes and see exactly how they looked, all alive in steady colour, gleaming and fresh. The thumping and trilling of the distant piano-organ offered itself equally to everybody. It knew the secret and twirled and swept all the fussing away into a tune. Quietly the clock of the church in the little town struck four. She would be late for tea. The children would have tea with Mrs. Corrie. Wiggerson would make a fresh pot for her when she got in. There would be a little tray in her quiet room, a cup and saucer, the little sprigged silk tea-cosy, the “Human Document.” It would be the beginning of the week-end. It would link her up again with the early afternoon, the rose-filled drawing-room, the excited dining-room, the smell of varnish from the billiard-room floor.

8

Mrs. Corrie and the children were dancing in a lingering patch of sunlight at the far end of the lawn as Miriam came up the drive with her chocolates. They waved and shouted to her, trumpeting questions through their hands. She held up the bag. “Go and have tea, you poor soul,” sang Mrs. Corrie. How excited they were. In the flower-filled hall Stokes, muttering excitedly to herself, was lighting the fire. The crackling of wood came from the dining-room.

Wiggerson was swishing about in the dining-room clearing away tea.

9

Sitting in her low basket chair with her dismantled tea-tray at her side and a picture in her mind of the new Mrs. Kronen coming down from London in the train in bright new clothes and a dust-cloak, Miriam was startled by hearing frightened footsteps rush across the landing and a frightened voice calling for Wiggerson.

“Something’s happened,” she told herself angrily, “it always does when everybody’s so excited—‘tel qui rit vendredi dimanche pleurera.’”

Opening the door she found the landing empty and quiet, the setting sun streamed across its coloured spaces, the flowers blazed as if they were standing in a garden.... Joey always went for walks if she were feeling thick and fat, she always went for a long walk; in coats with skirts to match; a costume; never a jacket with a different skirt ... the long cool passage leading away to the invisible door of Mr. Corrie’s room was full of wreathing smoke. Wiggerson rushed across the landing along the passage, followed by Mrs. Corrie, with her head up and her handkerchief to her nose and all her figure tense and angular and strong. Both had passed silently; but there were shriekings on the stairs and the children came at Miriam with cries and screams. “Rollo’ll be killed”; “Go to her”; “Go and save vem”; the children shrieked and leaped up and down in front of her. The boy’s white features worked as if they must dislocate; his eyes were black with terror; he wrung his hands. Sybil’s face, scarlet and shapeless and streaming with tears, blazed wrath at Miriam through her green eyes. “Be quiet,” Miriam said in loud tones. “I shall do nothing till you are quiet.” With a shriek the girl lashed at her with the dog-whip. “Save vem, save vem,” shrieked the boy, twisting his arms in the air. “Will you both be quiet instantly?” shouted Miriam, as the blood rose to her head, catching and holding the boy. Both children howled and choked; Sybil flung herself forward howling, and Miriam felt her teeth in her wrist. The smoke came pouring out of the little hidden room, coiling itself against the air of the passage like some fascinating silent inevitable grimace. Wiggerson’s figure flying through it stirred it strangely, but it closed behind her and billowed horribly out towards Mrs. Corrie standing just clear of its advance with her handkerchief pressed to her face, quiet, not calling to Wiggerson, waiting where she had disappeared. Miriam could not move. Sybil’s body hung fastened to her own with entwining limbs ... “a fight in the jungle,” a tiger flung fixed like a leech against the breast of a screaming elephant ... the boy had the whip and was slashing at her legs through her thin dress and uttering piercing shrieks.

10

“Stokes is an idjut,” said Mrs. Corrie, going gaily downstairs with the two exhausted white-faced children followed by Wiggerson flitting along with bloodshot blinking eyes.

Stokes, sullenly brooding, lighting Mr. Corrie’s fire without putting back the register. What was it that made Stokes sullen and brooding so that the accident had happened and the smoke had come? Stokes had seen something, someone, like the fearful oncoming curving stare of the smoke. Mrs. Corrie and Wiggerson did not brood like that. They laughed and wept and snatched things out of danger. They had thin faces. Mrs. Corrie was alone, like an aspen shaking its leaves in windless air. She knew she was alone. Wiggerson ... Wiggerson was...? Making her toilet in the spring sunset Miriam saw all that time Wiggerson’s tall body hurtling about in her small pantry, quickly selecting and packing things on a tray—her eyes glancing swiftly downwards as her foot caught, the swift bending of her body, the rip, rip as she tore the braiding from her skirt, her intent face as she threw it from her and swept sinuously upright, her undisturbed hands once more at their swift work.

11

What a strange photograph ... a woman in Grecian drapery seated on a stonework chair with a small harp on her knees, one hand limply tweaking the strings of her harp; her head thrown back, her eyes, hard and bright, staring up into the sky, “Inspiration” printed in ink on the white margin under the photograph. It was an Englishwoman, a large stiff square body, a coil of carefully crimped hair and a curled fringe, pretending. There were people who would say, “What a pretty photograph,” and mean it ... the draperies and the attitude. How easy it was to take people in, just by acting. Not the real people. There were real people. Where were they? That horrid thing could get itself on to Mrs. Corrie’s drawing-room table and sit there unbroken. All women were inspired in a way. It was true enough. But it was a secret. Men ought not to be told. They must find it out for themselves. To dress up and try to make it something to attract somebody. She was not a woman, she was a woman ... oh, curse it all. But men liked actresses. They liked being fooled.

Miriam looked closely at the photograph with hatred in her eyes. Why not the stone steps and the chair and the sense of sunlight; sunlit air? That would be enough. “You get in the way of the air, you thing,” she muttered, and the woman’s helpless unconscious sandalled feet reproached her. Voices were shouting to each other on the upper landing. It was Mrs. Kronen’s photograph, of course. Miriam moved quickly away, ashamed of having stared. But it was too late; she had done a horrid thing again. She saw, as if it were in the room with her, the affair of the taking of the photograph, a cross face coming down from its pose to argue with the photographer, and then flung upwards again, waiting. And she had put or let someone put it, in a frame, at once on a strange drawing-room table. Perhaps her husband had put it there. But if he valued it he would hide and shelter it.... When we meet, she will know I have stared at her photograph.

Mrs. Kronen came suddenly in with Mrs. Corrie, talking in a rich deep thick voice that moved, with large intervals, up and down a long scale and yet produced a curious effect of toneless flatness, just as if she were speaking a narrow nasal Cockney. There was a Cockney sound somewhere in her voice. She began at once loudly praising everything in the room, hardly pausing when Miriam was introduced to her, and giving no sign of having seen her. If I were alone with her, thought Miriam, I should want to say “’Ullo, ’ow’s yourself?” and grin. It would be the only thing one could genuinely do. Mrs. Corrie almost giggled at the end of each of Mrs. Kronen’s exclamations, but she was very gay and animated and so was Mr. Corrie when he came in with Mr. Kronen. They all went in to dinner talking and laughing loudly. And they went on laughing and joking and talking loudly against each other through dinner.

12

Mr. and Mrs. Corrie looked thin and small and very young. Once or twice they laughed at the same moment and glanced at each other. Mr. Corrie’s face was flushed. Mr. and Mrs. Kronen looked like brother and sister—only that she said South Africa as if it were a phrase in a tragic recitative from an oratorio and he as if it were something he had behind him that gave him a sort of advantage over everyone. It seemed to be all he had. They had both been in South Africa, travelling in bullock waggons blinded by the fierce light and choked with sand. It seemed to linger in the curious brickish look of their complexions and the hard yellow of their hair. The talk about South Africa lasted all dinnertime. It seemed to interest Mr. Corrie. His eyes gleamed strangely as he talked about I.D.B.’s. Everybody at the table said, “Illicit dahmond bah” at least once with a little thrill of the face. Why was it illicit to buy diamonds?—strange people out there in the glare buying gleaming stones from miners and this curious feeling about it all round the table, everybody with hot glinting excited eyes—and somebody, some man, a business man who had handed round diamonds like chocolates to his friends in his box at the opera, a Stock Exchange man in a frock-coat throwing himself into the sea somewhere between England and South Africa—ah, what a pity, worried to death, with an excited head. He wanted diamonds. And when Mr. Corrie handed Mrs. Kronen a dish of fruit and said, “A banana? A bite of a barnato?” they all laughed, so comfortably. Something illicit seemed to creep into the very pictures and flow over the walls. The poor man’s body falling desperately into the sea. He could not endure his own excited eyes.

13

Early on Monday morning Miriam heard Mrs. Kronen singing in the bathroom. She tried not to listen and listened. The bold sound had come in through her open door when Stokes brought her breakfast tray. With it had come the smell of a downstairs breakfast, coffee, a curious fresh, sustaining odour of coffee and freshly frying rashers. There was coffee on her own tray this morning and a letter addressed to her in a bold unknown hand. She sipped her coffee at once and put the overwhelming letter aside on her blue coverlet. It was an overweight, something thrown in on the surface of the tide on which she had awakened in the soft fresh harmonies of rose and blue of her curtained room. It could wait. It had come out of the world for her; but she felt independent of it. It did not disturb her. Its overwhelming quality was in the fact that she had called it to her out of the world. It was as if she had herself addressed the large bold envelope. She left it. Her sipped coffee steered her into the tide of the downstairs life. There was breakfast downstairs, steaming coffee and entrée dishes for Mr. Corrie and the Kronens, and they were all going off by the early train.

“C’est si bon,” sang Mrs. Kronen in a deep baritone, as Miriam drank her coffee; “de con-fon-dre en un, deu-eux bai-sers.” She sang it out through the quiet upstairs rooms, she met with it the bustle of preparation downstairs. It was a world she lived in that made her able to carry off these things without being disturbed by them, a rosy secret world in which she lived secure. A richness at the heart of things. She was there. She possessed it with her large strong brick-red and rose-white frame and her strong yellow hair. Did she, really? At any rate she wanted to suggest that she did—that that secret richness was the heart of things. She flung out boldly that it was and that she was there, but a sort of soft horrible slurring flatness in her voice suggested evil, as if a sort of restless acceptance of something evil was the price of her carelessness. Perhaps that was how things were. Perhaps that was part of taking each fair mask for what it shows itself. She made everyone else seem cloudy and shrivelled and dim. Miriam took up the stupendous envelope and held its solid weight in her hand as Mrs. Kronen sang on. “All right,” she said, and smiled at it, feeling daring and strong. Its arrival would have been quite different if Mrs. Kronen had not been there; this curious powerful independent morning in the rose-blue room would not have happened in the same way without Mrs. Kronen.... Live, don’t worry.... I’ve always been worrying and bothering. I’m going to be like Mrs. Kronen; but quite different, because she hasn’t the least idea how beautiful things really are. She doesn’t know that everyone is living a beautiful strange life that has never been lived before. If she did she would not be ashamed of herself. Miriam gave a great sigh and smiled.

14

Her breakfast was a feast. Sitting back under the softly tinted canopy with the soft folds of the bed curtains hanging near on either side she stared at the bright light pouring in through the lattices. Her room was a great square of happy light ... happy, happy. She gathered up all the sadness she had ever known and flung it from her. All the dark things of the past flashed with a strange beauty as she flung them out. The light had been there all the time; but she had known it only at moments. Now she knew what she wanted. Bright mornings, beautiful bright rooms, a wilderness of beauty all round her all the time—at any cost. Any life that had not these things she would refuse.... Roses in her blood and gold in her hair ... it was something belonging to them, something that made them gleam. It was her right; even if they gleamed only for her. They gleamed, she knew it. Youth, the glory of youth. So strong. She had got herself into this beautiful life, found her way to it; she would stay in it for ever, work in it, make money and when she was old, have soft, pink curtains and fragrant things to remind her, as long as she could lift her hand. No more ugliness, no more schools or mean little houses. Luxuries, beautiful gleaming things ... a secret happy life.

She smiled securely, with her eyes, the strange happy smile that had come in the brougham....

15

How strong Mrs. Kronen was.... How huge and strong she had looked standing in the hall while Mr. Corrie said cruel laughing little things about the billiard-room floor.... “She’ll paint Madonna lilies on the table next.” ... Mrs. Kronen saying nothing, smiling more and more without moving her face, growing bigger and stronger and taller as Mr. Corrie grumbled and Mr. Kronen fidgeted, cross and disappointed by the hall fire and then suddenly lifting her head and singing, a great flourish of clear strong notes filling the hall and pealing up through the house as she swept into the drawing-room.

Singing song after song to her own loud accompaniment, great emphatic sweeps of song, so that everyone came and sat about in the room listening and waiting, the men staring at the back of her head as she sat at the piano. Waiting, for music—they did not know they were waiting for music, waiting for her to stop getting between them and the music. They admired her, her magnificent singing and waited, unsatisfied, in the sweetness of the lamp-lit flower-filled room that her music did not touch. She sang on and on and they all grew smaller and smaller in the great sea of sound, more and more hopelessly waiting.

16

And Mrs. Corrie had sat deep in her large chair, dead and drowned. Dead because of something she had never known. Dead in ignorance and living bravely on—her sweet thin voice rising above the gloom where she lay hid—a gloom where there were no thoughts. Nearly all women were like that, living in a gloom where there were no thoughts. If anyone could persuade her that she was alive she would do nothing but rush about and dance and sing ... how irritating that would be ... making men smile and trot about and look silly ... no room for ideas; except in smoking-rooms—and—laboratories.... She was a good woman; a God woman; the sweetness of her bones and her thin sweet voice of tears and laughter were of God. Everyone knew that and worshipped her. Men’s ideas were devilish; clever and mean.... Was God a woman? Was God really irritating? No one could endure God really.... Men could not.... Women were of God in some way. That is what men could never forgive; the superiority of women.... “Perhaps I can’t stand women because I’m a sort of horrid man.”

Mrs. Kronen was a sort of man too. She was not perplexed. But she was a woman too—because she was not mean and petty and fussy as men are ... sitting tall and square at the piano with the square tall form of her husband standing ready to turn the pages—her strong baritone voice rolling out, “Ai-me-moi ... car ton charme-est étrange ... et-je-t’ai-me.”

17

Recalling the song as she sat back in the alcove of her bed motionless, keeping the brightness of her room at its first intensity, Miriam remembered that it had brought her a moment when the flower-filled drawing-room had seemed to be lit, from within herself, a sudden light that had kept her very still and made the bowls of roses blaze with deepening colours. In her mind she had seen garden beyond garden of roses, sunlit, brighter and brighter and had made a rapturous prayer. She remembered the words ... God.... I’m not afraid of you. Look at the gardens ... and something had smiled through the lit gardens exultantly, and Mrs. Kronen’s voice had raged through the room like a storm, “Ai-me-moi!...” and Mr. Corrie’s eyes were strange and hard with shadows.... He knew, in some strange way men knew there were gardens everywhere, not always visible. Women did not seem to know....

The letter on her tray was a sort of response to her prayer.

CHAPTER V

1

It was quite a long letter—signed with a large “Bob” set crosswise. It began by asking her advice about a wedding present for Harriett and ended with the suggestion that she should meet him and help him to make a suitable selection. It was written from the British Chess Club, to her, because Bob Greville wanted to see her. Harriett’s wedding present was only an excuse. She flung the envelope and the two sheets of notepaper, spread loose, on her blue coverlet and smiled into her cup as she finished her coffee. Old Bob did not know that he had clad her in armour. He wanted to meet her alone. They two people were to meet and talk, without any reason, because they wanted to. But what could she have to say to anyone who thought that Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, even a nice edition bound in calf, or How to be Happy though Married, suitable for a wedding present for Harriett, or for anybody? Still, they might write to each other. It was right that letters, secret letters, should be brought into her blue room in the morning with her breakfast. She dropped out of bed smiling and sniffed at the roses she had worn the day before, standing in a glass on her washstand, freshened, half faded, half fresh, intoxicating as she bent over them. She dressed, without drawing back her curtains, in the soft rose-blue light, singing Mrs. Kronen’s song in an undertone.

2

At eleven o’clock Mrs. Corrie swept into the schoolroom. Miriam looked easily up at her from the dreamy thicket where she and the children had spent their hour, united and content, speaking in undertones, getting easily through books that had seemed tiresome and indifferent the day before. She had felt the play of her mind on theirs and their steady adult response. They had joined as conspirators in this mad contemptible business of mastering the trick of the text-book, each dreaming the while his own dream.

“You darlings,” cried Mrs. Corrie, “how sweet you all look!” They raised drunken eyes and beamed drowsily at her. “Give them a holiday,” said Mrs. Corrie, raising her hands over the table like a conductor about to start an orchestra. “Give them a holiday—a picnic—and come and buy hats!”

In a moment the room was in an uproar of capering figures. “Hats! A new hat for Rollo! Heaps of cash! I’ve got heaps of cash!”

Miriam blinked from her thicket. This was anarchy; she felt herself sliding. But they were so old. All so old and experienced. She so young, by so far the youngest of the four.

3

Mrs. Corrie sat back in the victoria, her face alight under the cream lace veil she had twisted round her soft winter hat, and talked in quiet clipped phrases: soft shouts. They were driving swiftly through the fresh warmth of the April midday.

They were off for the afternoon. The commons gleamed a prelude. Miriam saw that Mrs. Corrie did not notice them nor think of sweeping back across them later on through the afternoon air and seeing them move and gleam in the afternoon light. She did not think of the bright shops, the strangely dyed artificial flowers with their curious fascinating smell interwoven with the strange warm smell of velvet and chenille and straw.... Miriam had once bought a hat in a shop in Kensington. As long as it lasted it had kept for her whenever she looked at its softly dyed curiously plaited straw something of the exciting fascination of the shop, the curious faint flat odours of millinery, the peculiar dim warm smell of silks and velvets—silk, China and Japan, silkworms weaving shining threads in the dark. Even when it had become associated with outings and events and shabby with exposure it remained each time she took it afresh from its box of wrappings, a mysterious sacred thing; and the soft blending of its colours, the coiled restraint of its shape, the texture of its snuggled trimmings were a support, refreshing her thoughts. She had never known anyone who went regularly to good hatshops; the sense of them as a part of life was linked only with Mrs. Kronen—Mrs. Kronen’s little close toque made of delicately shaded velvet violets and lined with satin, her silky peacock blue straw shining with rich filmy tones, its mass of dull shot blue-green ribbon and the soft rose pink of its velvet roses. These hats had excited Mrs. Corrie; the hats and the sand-coloured silk dust cloak explained her cheque and her sudden happiness. But they only made her want to buy hats. The going and the shops were nothing to her. She talked about the Kronens as they drove, speaking as though she wanted Miriam to hear without answering. “She knows Mrs. Kronen fascinates me,” thought Miriam.

“Ain’t they a pair, lordy ... him divorced and her divorced and then marryin’ each other. Ain’t it scandalous, eh?”

People like the Corries disapproved of people like the Kronens, but had them to stay with them and were excited about their clothes. Miriam returned to listen to the singing of her body; it would sing until they got to the station. As she listened she held firmly clasped the letter she had addressed to the British Chess Club to say she would be nowhere near London until the weddings. “She doesn’t care a rap about him—not a teeny rap ... she’s a wise lady ... dollars—that’s the thing,” whispered Mrs. Corrie gaily. What does she want me to say? thought Miriam. What would she say if I pretended to agree?

Should she tell her about the weddings? Perhaps not. It would be time enough, she reflected rapidly, when she had to ask permission to go home for them. Mrs. Corrie had not asked her a single question about things at home, and if she were to say, “We used to live in a big house and my father lost nearly all his money and we live now in a tiny villa and two of my sisters are to be married,” it would break into this strange easy new life. It would break the charm and not bring her any nearer to Mrs. Corrie. And Mrs. Corrie would not really understand about the home troubles. Mrs. Corrie had always been lonely and sad, inside. She had been an orphan, but brought up by a wealthy uncle and always living in wealth and now she seemed to think about nothing but the children and the house and the garden—hating theatres and dances and never going to them or paying visits or seeing the wonder of anything. She would only say, “Don’t you marry yourself off, young lady, marriage is a fraud. You wait for a wealthy one.” Whatever one said to her, whatever joy one showed her would lead to that.

But the two weddings hovered about the commons. They were a great possession. Nothing to worry about in them. Gerald and Bennett who had managed everything since the smash would manage them. Sarah and Harriet would be married from the little villa and would be Mrs. Brodie and Mrs. Ducayne just like anybody else. So safe. And she herself, free, getting interesting letters, going up to town with Mrs. Corrie, no worry, spring hats and the commons and garden waiting for them. She was sure she did not want to see the commons overburdened by the idea of her own wedding. Two was enough for the present. Of course, some day—someone, somewhere, wonderful and different from everyone else. Cash—no, not business and cigars and offices ... the city, horrible bloated men with shapeless figures, horrible chemists’ shops advertising pick-me-ups ... a cottage—a cottage. Why did people laugh at love in a cottage? The outsides of cottages were the best part, everyone said. They were dark inside; but why not? A lamp; and outside the garden and the light.

“She’s had all kinds of operations,” mused Mrs. Corrie.

“Really?”

“Deadly awful. In nursing homes. She’ll never have any kiddies.”

Were there cold shadows on everything, everywhere?

She turned a pleading face to Mrs. Corrie. They were driving into the station yard.

“It’s true, true, true,” laughed Mrs. Corrie. “She doesn’t care, she doesn’t want any. They’re all like that, that sort.”

Miriam mused intensely. She felt Mrs. Kronen ought to be there to answer. She had some secret Mrs. Corrie did not possess. Mrs. Corrie looked suddenly small and mild and funny. Why did she think it dreadful that Mrs. Kronen should have no children? There was nothing wonderful in having children. It was better to sing. She was perfectly sure that she herself did not want children.... “Superior women don’t marry,” she said, “sir she said, sir she said, su, per, i, or women”—but that meant blue stockings.

4

“I don’t want a silly hat,” said Mrs. Corrie, as their hansom drew up in bright sunlight outside a milliner’s at the southern end of Regent Street. “Let’s buy a real lovely teapot or a Bartolozzi or somethin’. What fun to go home with somethin’ real nice. Eh? A real real beauty Dresden teapot,” she chanted, floating into the dimness of the shop where large hats standing on long straight stands flared softly like blossoms in the twilight.

She swept about in her flowing lace-trimmed twine-coloured overcoat on the green velvet carpet, or stood ruthlessly trying on a hat, pressing its wire frame to fit her head, crushing her fingers into tucked tulle, talking and trying, and discarding until the collection was exhausted. Miriam sat angry and admiring, wondering at the subdued helplessness of the satin-clad assistant, sorry for the discarded hats lying carelessly about, their glory dimmed. All the hats, whatever their shape or colour seemed to her to decorate the bronze head and the twine-coloured coat. The little toques gave slenderness and willowy height, and the large flowered ribboned hats, the moment a veil draped the boniness of the face made, Miriam felt, an entrancing picturesqueness. With each hat Mrs. Corrie addressed the large mirror calling herself a freak, a sketch, a nightmare, a real real fogey.

5

The process seemed endless and Miriam sat at last scourging herself with angry questions. “Why doesn’t she decide,” she found herself repeating almost aloud, her hot tired eyes turning for relief to the soft guipure-edged tussore curtain screening the lower part of the window, “what kind of hat she really wants and then look at the few most like it and perhaps have one altered?...” “It’s so awfully silly not to have a plan. She’ll go on simply for ever.” But the soft curtain running so evenly along its smooth clean brass rod was restful, and plan or no plan the trouble would presently come to an end and there would be no discomforts to face when it was over—no vulgar bun shops, no struggling on to a penny ’bus with your ride perhaps spoiled by a dreadful neighbour, but Regent Street in the bright sun, a hansom, a smart obliging driver with a buttonhole, skimming along to tea somewhere, the first-class journey home, the carriage at the station, the green commons.

“Perhaps,” said the assistant at last in a cheerful suggestive furious voice, flinging aside with just Mrs. Corrie’s cheerful abandon, a large cream lace hat with a soft fresh mass of tiny banksia roses under its left brim, “Perhaps moddom will allow me to make her a shape and trim it to her own design.”

Mrs. Corrie stood arrested in the middle of the green velvet floor. Wearily Miriam faced the possibility of the development of this fresh opportunity for going on for ever.

“Wouldn’t that be lovely?” said Mrs. Corrie, turning to her enthusiastically.

“Yes,” said Miriam eagerly. Both women were facing her and she felt that anything would be better than their united contemplation of her brown stuff dress with its square sleeves and her brown straw hat with black ribbon and its yellow paper buttercups.

“Can’t be did though,” said Mrs. Corrie in a cold level voice, turning swiftly back to the hats massed in a confused heap on the mahogany slab. Standing over them and tweaking at one and another as she spoke she made a quiet little speech, indicating that such and such might do for the garden and such others for driving, some dozen altogether she finally ordered to be sent at once to an address in Brook Street where she would make her final selection whilst the messenger waited. “Have you got the address all right?” she wound up; “so kind of you.” “Come along, you poor thing you look worn out,” she cried to Miriam, without looking at her as she swept from the shop. She waved her sunshade at a passing hansom and as it drew sharply up with an exciting clatter near the curb she grasped Miriam’s arm, “Shall we try Perrin’s? It’s only three doors up.” Miriam glanced along and caught a glimpse of another hat shop. “Do you really want to?” she suggested reluctantly. “No! No! not a bit old spoil sport. Chum yong, jump in,” laughed Mrs. Corrie.

“Oh, if you really want to,” began Miriam, but Mrs. Corrie, singing out the address to the driver was putting her into the cab and showing her how to make an easy passage for the one who gets last into a hansom by slipping into the near corner. Her appreciation of this little manœuvre helped her over her contrition and she responded with gay insincerity to Mrs. Corrie’s assurance of the fun they would have over the hats at Mrs. Kronen’s.... Tea at Mrs. Kronen’s then. How strange and alarming ... but she felt too tired to sustain a tête-à-tête at a smart tea shop. “After tea we’ll drop into a china shop and get somethin’ real nice,” said Mrs. Corrie excitedly, as they bowled up Regent Street.