Honeycomb

6

They found Mrs. Kronen in a mauve and white drawing-room, reclining on a mauve and white striped settee in a pale mauve tea gown. On a large low table a frail mauve tea service stood ready, and Mrs. Kronen rose tall to welcome them dropping on to the mauve carpet a little volume bound in pale green velvet. On a second low table were strawberries in a shallow wide bowl, a squat jug brimming with cream, dark wedding cake hiding a pewter plate, a silken bag unloosed, showing marvellous large various sweetmeats heavy against its silk lining. As Mrs. Kronen slurred her fingers across Miriam’s hand she ordered the manservant who had dipped and gathered up the green velvet volume to ask for the tea-cakes.

Then this was “Society.” To come so easily up from the Corries’ beautiful home, via the West End hat shop to this wonderful West End flat and eat strawberries in April.... If only the home people could see. Her fatigue vanished. Secure from Mrs. Kronen’s notice she sat in a mauve and white striped chair and contemplated her surroundings.

While they were waiting for the tea-cakes, Mrs. Kronen trailed about the mauve floor reciting her impressions of the weather. “So lovely,” she intoned in her curious half-Cockney. “I almost—went—out. But I haven’t. I—haven’t—stirred. It is lovely inside on this sort of spring day—the light.”

She paused and swept about. There is something about her, thought Miriam. It’s true, the light inside on a clear spring day.... I never thought of that. It is somehow spring in here in the middle of London in some real way. Her blood leaped and sang as it had done driving across the commons; but even more sweetly and keenly. It wouldn’t be, in a dingy room, even in the country.... It’s an essence—something you feel in the right surroundings.... What chances these people have. They get the most out of everything. Get everything in advance and over and over again. They can go into the country any minute as well as have clear light rooms. Nothing is ever grubby. And London there, all round; London ... London was a soft, sea-like sound; a sound shutting in the spring. The spring gleamed and thrilled through everything in the pure bright room.... She hoped Mrs. Kronen would say no more about the light. Light, light, light. As the manservant brewed the tea and the silver teapot shone in the light as he moved it—silver and strange black splashes of light—caught and moving in the room. Drawing off her gloves she felt as if she could touch the flowing light.... Flowing in out of the dawn, moving and flowing and brooding and changing all day, in rooms. Mrs. Kronen was back on her settee sitting upright in her mauve gown, all strong soft curves. “That play of Wilde’s ...” she said. Miriam shook at the name. “You ought not to miss it. He—has—such—genius.” Wilde ... Wilde ... a play in the spring—someone named Wilde. Wild spring. That was genius. There was something in the name.... “Never go to the theatre; never, never, never,” Mrs. Corrie was saying, “too much of a bore.” Genius ... genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. Capacity. A silly definition; like a proverb—made up by somebody who wanted to explain.... Wylde, Wilde.... Spring.... Genius.

8

The little feast was over and Mrs. Kronen was puffing at a cigarette when the hats were announced. As the fine incense reached her Miriam regretted that she had not confessed to being a smoker. The suggestion of tobacco brought the charm of the afternoon to its height. When the magic of the scented cloud drew her eyes to Mrs. Kronen’s face it was almost intolerable in its keenness. She gazed wondering whether Mrs. Kronen felt so nearly wild with happiness as she did herself.... Life what are you—what is life? she almost said aloud. The face was uplifted as it had been in the photograph, but with all the colour, the firm bows of gold hair, the colour in the face and strong white pillar of neck, the eyes closed instead of staring upwards and the rather full mouth flattened and drooping with its weight into a sort of tragic shapeliness—like some martyr ... that picture by Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, thought Miriam ... perfect reality. She liked Mrs. Kronen for smoking like that. She was not doing it for show. She would have smoked in the same way if she had been alone. She probably wished she was, as Mrs. Corrie did not smoke. How she must have hated missing her smokes at Newlands, unless she had smoked in her room.

“It’s—a—mis-take,” said Mrs. Kronen incredulously, in response to the man’s announcement of the arrival of the hats. She waved her cigarette “imperiously,” thought Miriam, “how she enjoys showing off” ... to and fro in time with her words. Mrs. Corrie rose laughing and explaining and apologising. Waving her cigarette about once more Mrs. Kronen ordered the hats to be brought in and her maid to be summoned, but retained her expression of vexed incredulity. She’s simply longing for us to be off now, thought Miriam, and changed her opinion a few moments later when Mrs. Kronen, assuming on the settee the reclining position in which they had found her when they came in, disposed one by one of the hats as Mrs. Corrie and the maid freed them from their boxes and wrappings, with a little flourish of the cigarette and a few slow words.... “Im-poss-i-ble; not-in-key-with-your-lines; slightly too ingénue,” etc.: to three or four she gave a grudging approval, whereupon Mrs. Corrie who was laughing and pouncing from box to box would stand upright and pace holding the favoured hat rakishly on her head. The selection was soon made and Miriam, whose weariness had returned with the millinery, was sent off to instruct the messenger that three hats had been selected and a bill might be sent to Brook Street in the morning.

As she was treating with the messenger in the little mauve and white hall, Mrs. Corrie came out and tapped her on the shoulder. Turning, Miriam found her smiling and mysterious. “We’re going by the 5.30,” she whispered. “Would you like to go for a walk for half an hour and come back here?”

“Rather!” said Miriam heartily, with a break in her voice and feeling utterly crushed. The beautiful clear room. She loved it and belonged to it. She was turned out. “All right,” smiled Mrs. Corrie encouragingly and disappeared. Under the eyes of the messenger and the servants who were coming out of the boudoir laden with hat boxes, she got herself out through the door.

CHAPTER VI

1

The West End street ... grey buildings rising on either side, feeling away into the approaching distance—angles sharp against the sky ... softened angles of buildings against other buildings ... high moulded angles soft as crumb, with deep undershadows ... creepers fraying from balconies ... strips of window blossoms across the buildings, scarlet, yellow, high up; a confusion of lavender and white pouching out along a dipping sill ... a wash of green creeper up a white painted house front ... patches of shadow and bright light.... Sounds of visible near things streaked and scored with broken light as they moved, led off into untraced distant sounds ... chiming together.

2

Wide golden streaming Regent Street was quite near. Some near narrow street would lead into it.

3

Flags of pavement flowing along—smooth clean grey squares and oblongs, faintly polished, shaping and drawing away—sliding into each other.... I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone ... sunlit; gleaming under dark winter rain; shining under warm sunlit rain, sending up a fresh stony smell ... always there ... dark and light ... dawn, stealing....

4

Life streamed up from the close dense stone. With every footstep she felt she could fly.

5

The little dignified high-built cut-through street, with its sudden walled-in church, swept round and opened into brightness and a clamour of central sounds ringing harshly up into the sky.

6

The pavement of heaven.

To walk along the radiant pavement of sunlit Regent Street forever.

7

She sped along looking at nothing. Shops passed by, bright endless caverns screened with glass ... the bright teeth of a grand piano running along the edge of its darkness, a cataract of light pouring down its raised lid; forests of hats; dresses, shining against darkness, bright headless crumpling stalks; sly, silky, ominous furs; metals, cold and clanging, brandishing the light; close prickling fire of jewels ... strange people who bought these things, touched and bought them.

8

She pulled up sharply in front of a window. The pavement round it was clear, allowing her to stand rooted where she had been walking, in the middle of the pavement, in the midst of the tide flowing from the clear window, a soft fresh tide of sunlit colours ... clear green glass shelves laden with shapes of fluted glass, glinting transparencies of mauve and amber and green, rose-pearl and milky blue, welded to a flowing tide, freshening and flowing through her blood, a sea rising and falling with her breathing.

9

The edge had gone from the keenness of the light. The street was a happy, sunny, simple street—small. She was vast. She could gather up the buildings in her arms and push them away, clearing the sky ... a strange darkling and she would sleep. She felt drowsy, a drowsiness in her brain and limbs and great strength, and hunger.

A clock told her she had been away from Brook Street ten minutes. Twenty minutes to spare. What should she do with her strength? Talk to someone or write ... Bob; where was Bob? Somewhere in the West End. She would write from the West End a note to him in the West End.

10

There were no cheap shops in Regent Street. She looked about. Across the way a little side street showing a small newspaper shop offered help.

11

Thoroughly frightened she hurried with clenched hands down the little mean street ready to give up her scheme at the first sight of an unfriendly eye. “We went through those awful side streets off the West End; I was terrified; I didn’t know where he was driving us,” Mrs. Poole had said about a cabman driving to the theatre ... and her face as she sat in her thick pink dress by the dining-room fire had been cunning and mean and full of terror. A small shop appeared close at hand, there were newspaper posters propped outside it and its window was full of fly-blown pipes, toilet requisites, stationery and odd-looking books. “Letters may be left here,” said a dirty square of cardboard in the corner of the window. “That’s all right,” thought Miriam, “it’s a sort of agency.” She plunged into the gloomy interior. “Yes!” shouted a tall stout man with a red coarse face coming forward, as if she had asked something that had made him angry. “I want some notepaper, just a little, the smallest quantity you have and an envelope,” said Miriam, quivering and panic-stricken in the hostile atmosphere. The man turned and whisked a small packet off a shelf, throwing it down on the counter before her. “One penny!” bellowed the man as she took it up. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Miriam ingratiatingly putting down twopence. “Do you sell pencils?” The man’s great fingers seemed an endless time wrenching a small metal-sheathed pencil from its card. The street outside would have closed in and swallowed her up forever if she did not quickly get away.

12

“Dear Mr. Greville,” she wrote in a clear bold hand.... He won’t expect me to have that kind of handwriting, like his own, but stronger. He’ll admire it on the page and then hear a man’s voice, Pater’s voice talking behind it and not like it. Me. He’d be a little afraid of it. She felt her hard self standing there as she wrote, and shifted her feet a little, raising one heel from the ground, trying to feminise her attitude; but her hat was hard against her forehead, her clothes would not flow.... “Just imagine that I am in town—I could have helped you with your shopping if I had known I was coming....” The first page was half filled. She glanced at her neighbours, a woman on one side and a man on the other, both bending over telegram forms in a careless preoccupied way—wealthy, with expensive clothes with West End lines.... Regent Street was Salviati’s. It was Liberty’s and a music shop and the shop with the chickens. But most of all it was Salviati’s. She feared the officials behind the long grating could see by the expression of her shoulders that she was a scrubby person who was breaking the rules by using one of the little compartments with its generosity of ink and pen and blotting paper, for letter writing. Someone was standing impatiently just behind her, waiting for her place. “Telle est la vie,” she concluded with a flourish, “yours sincerely,” and addressed the envelope in almost illegible scrawls. Guiltily she bought a stamp and dropped the letter with a darkening sense of guilt into the box. It fell with a little muffled plop that resounded through her as she hurried away towards Brook Street. She walked quickly, to make everything surrounding her move more quickly. London revelled and clamoured softly all round her; she strode her swiftest heightening its clamorous joy. The West End people, their clothes, their carriages and hansoms, their clean bright spring-filled houses, their restaurants and the theatres waiting for them this evening, their easy way with each other, the mysterious something behind their faces, was hers. She, too, now had a mysterious secret face—a West End life of her own....

CHAPTER VII

1

The next morning there was a letter from Bob containing a page of description of his dull afternoon at his club within half a mile of her. “Let me know, my dear girl,” it went on, “whenever you escape from your gaolers, and do not suffer the thought of old Bob’s making himself responsible for all the telegrams you may send to cloud your joyous young independence.”

Miriam recoiled from the thought of a dull bored man looking to her for enlivenment of the moving coloured wonder of London and felt that Mr. and Mrs. Corrie were anything but gaolers. She was not sorry that she had missed the opportunity of seeing him. “Meanwhile write and tell me your thoughts,” was the only sentence that had appealed to her in the letter; but she was sure she could not whole-heartedly offer her thoughts as entertainment to a man who spent his time feeling dull in a club. He’s ... blasé, that’s it, she reflected. Perhaps it would be better not to write again. He’s not my sort a bit, she pondered with a sudden dim sense of his view of her as a dear girl. But she knew she wanted to retain him to decorate her breakfast tray with letters.

2

The following day Mrs. Corrie decided that she did not want to keep the hats. She would spend the money intended for them on sketching lessons. An artist should come once a week and teach them all to paint from Nature. This decision excited Miriam deeply, putting everything else out of her mind. It promised the satisfaction of a desire she had cherished with bitter hopelessness ever since her schooldays when every Friday had brought the necessity of choking down her longing to join the little crowd of girls who took “extras” and filed carelessly in to spend a magic afternoon amongst easels and casts in the large room. The old longing came leaping back higher than it had ever done before, making a curious eager smouldering in her chest—as Mrs. Corrie talked. An old sketch-book was brought out and Mrs. Corrie spent the morning making drawings of the heads of the children as they sat at lessons. The book was almost full of drawings of the children’s heads. Besides the heads there were rough sketches of people Miriam did not know. The first half-dozen pages were covered with small outlines, hands, feet, eyes, thumbs; a few lines suggesting a body. These pages seemed full of life. But the sketches of the children and the unknown people, sitting posed, in profile, looking up, looking down, full face, quarter face, three-quarters, depressed her. Learning to draw did not seem worth while if this was the result. The early pages haunted her memory as she sat over the children’s lessons. Feet, strange things stepping out, going through the world, running, dancing; the silent feet of people sitting in chairs pondering affairs of state. Eyes, looking at everything; looking at the astonishingness of everything.

3

“That’s the half-crown Mrs. Corrie gave me for the cabman, and the shilling for my tea,” said Miriam, handing the coins to her companion as they bowled over Waterloo Bridge. Seagulls were rising and dipping about the rim of the bridge and the sunlight lay upon the water and shimmered and flashed along the forms of the seagulls as they hovered and wheeled in the clear air. Miriam glanced at them through the little side window of the hansom with a remote keen part of her consciousness ... light flashing from the moving wing of a seagull, the blue water, the brilliant sky, the bite of sun-scorched air upon her cheek, the sound about her like the sound of the sea.... As she turned back to the shaded enclosure of the hansom these things shrivelled and vanished and left her dumb, helplessly poised between two worlds. This shabby part of London and the seaside bridge could make no terms with the man at her side, his soft grey suit, his soft grey felt hat, the graceful crook of his crossed knees, his gleaming spats, the glitter of the light upon patent leather shoes. He was gazing out ahead, with the look with which he had looked across Australia in his gold-digging days, weary until he got back to the West End, not talking because the cab made such a noise crossing the bridge. It was stupid of her to peer out of her window and get away to her own world like that. Nothing that we can ever say to each other can possibly interest us, she reflected. Why am I here? Her coins reassured her.

“Don’t think about pence, dear girl,” he said, in a voice that quavered a little against the noise of the cab, “when you’re with old Bob.” Without looking at her he gently closed her hand over the money.

“All right,” she shouted, “we’ll see, later on!”

The cab swept round into a street and the noise abated.

“When we’ve dropped those famous hats and rung the bell and run away we’ll go on to Bumpus’s and choose our book,” he said, as if asserting themselves and their errand against the confusion through which they were driving.

“Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures,” thought Miriam, glancing with loathing at the pointed corner of the collar that stuck out across the three firm little folds under the clean-shaven chin.... How funny I am. I suppose I shall get through the afternoon somehow. We shall go to the bookshop and then have tea and then it will be time to go back.

“The cabman is to take the hats into the shop and leave them. Isn’t it extraordinary?”

Bob laughed with a little fling of his head.

“The vagaries of the Fair, dear girl,” he said presently, in a soft blurred tone.

That’s one of his phrases, thought Miriam—that’s old-fashioned politeness; courtliness. Behind it he’s got some sort of mannish thought ... “the unaccountability of women” ... who can understand a woman—she doesn’t even understand herself—thought he’d given up trying to make out. He’s gone through life and got his own impressions; all utterly wrong ... talking about them with an air of wisdom to young men like Gerald ... my dear boy, a woman never knows her own mind. How utterly detestable mannishness is; so mighty and strong and comforting when you have been mewed up with women all your life, and then suddenly, in a second, far away, utterly imbecile and aggravating with a superior self-satisfied smile because a woman says one thing one minute and another the next. Men ought to be horsewhipped, all the grown men, all who have ever had that self-satisfied smile, all, all, horsewhipped until they apologise on their knees.

4

They sat in a curious oak settee, like a high-backed church pew. The waitress had cleared away the tea things and brought cigarettes, large flat Turkish cigarettes. Responding to her companion’s elaborate apologetic petition for permission to smoke it did not occur to Miriam to confess that she herself occasionally smoked. She forgot the fact in the completeness of her contentment. On the square oak table in front of them was a bowl of garden anemones, mauve and scarlet with black centres, flaring richly in the soft light coming through the green-tinted diamond panes of a little low square deep-silled window. On either side of the window short red curtains were drawn back and hung in straight, close folds ... scarlet geraniums ... against the creamy plaster wall. Bowls of flowers stood on other tables placed without crowding or confusion about the room and there was another green window with red curtains near a far-off corner. There were no other customers for the greater part of their time and when the waitress was not in the room it was still; a softly shaded stillness. Bob’s low blurred voice had gone on and on undisturbingly, no questions about her life or her plans, just jokes, about the tea-service and everything they had had, making her laugh. Whenever she laughed, he laughed delightedly. All the time her eyes had wandered from the brilliant anemones across to the soft green window with its scarlet curtains.

CHAPTER VIII

1

When May came life lay round Miriam without a flaw. She seemed to have reached the summit of a hill up which she had been climbing ever since she came to Newlands. The weeks had been green lanes of experience, fresh and scented and balmy and free from lurking fears. Now the landscape lay open before her eyes, clear from horizon to horizon, sunlit and flawless, past and future. The present, within her hands, brought her, whenever she paused to consider it, to the tips of her toes, as if its pressure lifted her. She would push it off, smiling—turning and shutting herself away from it, with laughter and closed eyes, she found herself deeper in the airy flood and drawing breath swam forward.

The old troubles, the things she had known from the beginning, the general shadow that lay over the family life and closed punctually in whenever the sun began to shine, her own personal thoughts, the impossibility of living with people, poverty, disease, death in a dark corner, had moved and changed, melted and flowed away.

The family shadow had shrunk long ago, back in the winter months they had spent in Bennett’s little bachelor villa, to a small black cloud of disgrace hanging over her father. At the time of its appearance, when the extent of his embarrassment was exactly known, she had sunk for a while under the conviction that the rest of her life must be spent in a vain attempt to pay off his debts. Her mind revolved round the problem hopelessly.... Even if she went on the stage she could not make enough to pay off one of his creditors. Most women who went on the stage, Gerald had said, made practically nothing, and the successful ones had to spend enormous sums in bribery whilst they were making their way—even the orchestra expected to be flattered and bribed. She would have to go on being a resident governess, keeping ten pounds a year for dress and paying over the rest of her salary. Her bitter rebellion against this prospect was reinforced by the creditors’ refusal to make her father a bankrupt. The refusal brought her a picture of the creditors, men “on the Stock Exchange,” sitting in a circle, in frock-coats, talking over her father’s affairs. She winced, her blood came scorching against her skin. She confronted them, “Stop!” she shouted, “stop talking—you smug ugly men! You shall be paid. Stop! Go away....” But Gerald had said, “They like the old boy ... it won’t hurt them ... they’re all made of money.” They liked him. They would be kind. What right had they to be “kind”? They would be kind to her too. They would smile at her plan of restitution and put it on one side. And yet secretly she knew that each one of them would like to be paid and was vexed and angry at losing money just as she was angry at having to sacrifice her life to them. She would not sacrifice her life, but if ever she found herself wealthy she would find out their names and pay them secretly. Probably that would be never.

Disgrace closed round her, stifling. “It’s us—we’re doomed,” she thought, feeling the stigma of her family in her flesh. “If I go on after this, holding up my head, I shall be a liar and a cheat. It will show in my face and in my walk, always.” She bowed her head. “I want to live,” murmured something. “I want to live, even if I slink through life. I will. I don’t care inside. I shall always have myself to be with.”

Something that was not touched, that sang far away down inside the gloom, that cared nothing for the creditors and could get away down and down into the twilight far away from the everlasting accusations of humanity.... The disgrace sat only in the muscles of her face, in her muscles, the stuff of her that had defied and fought and been laughed at and beaten. It would not get deeper. Deeper down was something cool and fresh—endless—an endless garden. In happiness it came up and made everything in the world into a garden. Sorrow blotted it over, but it was always there, waiting and looking on. It had looked on in Germany and had loved the music and the words and the happiness of the German girls and at Banbury Park, giving her no peace until she got away.

And now it had come to the surface and was with her all the time. Away in the distance filling in the horizon was the home life. Beyond the horizon, gone away for ever into some outer darkness were her old ideas of trouble, disease and death. Once they had been always quite near at hand, always ready to strike, laying cold hands on everything. They would return, but they would be changed. No need to fear them any more. She had seen them change. And when at last they came back, when there was nothing else left in front of her they would still be changing. “Get along, old ghosts,” she said, and they seemed friendly and smiling. Her father and mother, whose failure and death she had foreseen as a child with sudden bitter tears, were going on now step by step towards these ghostly things in the small bright lamplit villa in Gunnersbury. She had watched them there during the winter months before she came to Newlands. They had some secret together and did not feel the darkness. Their eyes were careless and bright. Startled, she had heard them laugh together as they talked in their room. Often their eyes were preoccupied, as if they were looking at a picture. She had laughed aloud at the thought whenever there had been any excuse, and they had always looked at her when she laughed her loud laugh. Had they understood? Did they know that it was themselves laughing in her? Families ought to laugh together whenever there was any excuse. She felt that her own grown-up laughter was the end of all the dreadful years. And three weeks ahead were the two weddings. The letters from home gleamed with descriptions of the increasing store of presents and new-made clothing. Miriam felt that they were her own; she would see them all at the last best moment when they were complete. She would have all that and all her pride in the outgoing lives of Sarah and Harriett that were like two sunlit streams. And meanwhile here within her hands was Newlands. Three weeks of days and nights of untroubled beauty. Interminable.

2

The roses were in bud. Every day she managed to visit them at least once, running out alone into the garden at twilight and coming back rich with the sense of the twilit green garden and the increasing stripes of colour between the tight shining green sheaths.

3

There had been no more talk of painting lessons. The idea had died in Mrs. Corrie’s mind the day after it had been born and a strange interest, something dreadful that was happening in London had taken its place. It seemed to absorb her completely and to spread a strange curious excitement throughout the house. She sent a servant every afternoon up to the station for an evening newspaper. The pink papers disappeared, but she was perpetually making allusions to their strange secret in a way that told Miriam she wanted to impart it and that irritated without really arousing her interest. She felt that anything that was being fussed over in pink evening papers was probably really nothing at all. She could not believe that anything that had such a strange effect on Mrs. Corrie could really interest her. But she longed to know exactly what the mysterious thing was. If it was simply a divorce case Mrs. Corrie would have told her about it, dropping out the whole story abstractedly in one of her little shocked sentences and immediately going on to speak of something else. She did not want to hear anything more about divorce; all her interested curiosity in divorced people had been dispersed by her contact with the Kronens. They had both been divorced and their lives were broken and muddly and they were not sure of themselves. Mrs. Kronen was strong and alone. But she was alone and would always be. If it were a murder everybody would talk about it openly. It must be something worse than a murder or a divorce. She felt she must know, must make Mrs. Corrie tell her and knew at the same time that she did not want to be distracted from the pure solid glory of the weeks by sharing a horrible secret. The thing kept Mrs. Corrie occupied and interested and left her free to live undisturbed. It was a barrier between them. And yet ... something that a human being had done that was worse than a murder or a divorce.

“Is it a divorce?” she said suddenly and insincerely one afternoon coming upon Mrs. Corrie scanning the newly arrived newspaper in the garden.

“Lordy no,” laughed Mrs. Corrie self-consciously, scrumpling the paper under her arm.

“What is it?” said Miriam, shaking and flushing. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” cried her mind, “don’t mention it, you don’t know yourself what it is. Nobody knows what anything is.”

“I couldn’t tell you!” cried Mrs. Corrie.

“Why not?” laughed Miriam.

“It’s too awful,” giggled Mrs. Corrie.

“Oh, you must tell me now you’ve begun.”

“It’s the most awful thing there is. It’s like the Bible,” said Mrs. Corrie, and fled into the house.

4

Little cities burning and flaring in a great plain until everything was consumed. Everything beginning again—clean. Would London be visited by destruction? Humanity was as bad now as in Bible days. It made one feel cold and sick. In the midst of the beauty and happiness of England—awful things, the worst things there were. What awful faces those people must have. It would be dreadful to see them.

5

At the week-end the house seemed full of little groups of conspirators, talking in corners, full of secret glee ... someone describing a room, drawn curtains and candlelight at midday ... wonderful ... and laughing. Why did they laugh? A candle-lit room in the midst of bright day ... wonderful, like a shrine.

The low-toned talk went on, in Mr. Corrie’s little study behind the half-closed door, in corners of the hall. Names were mentioned—the name of the man who wrote the plays, Mrs. Kronen’s “genius.” Miriam could only recall when she was alone that it was a woodland springtime name. It comforted her to think that this name was concerned in the horrible mystery. Her sympathies veered vaguely out towards the patch of disgrace in London and her interest died down.

6

The general preoccupation and excitement seemed to destroy her link with the household. As soon as the children’s tea was over she felt herself free. A strange tall woman came to stay in the house, trailing about in long jewelled dresses with a slight limp; Miss Tower, Mrs. Corrie called her Jin. But the name did not belong to her. Miriam could not think of any name that would belong to her ... talking to Mrs. Corrie at lunch with amused eyes and expressionless, small fine features of some illness that was going to kill her in eight or ten years, of her friends, talking about her men friends as if they were boys to be cried over. “Why don’t you marry him?” Mrs. Corrie would say of one or another. How happy the man would be, thought Miriam, gazing into the strange eyes and daring her to marry anyone and alter the eyes. Miss Tower spoke to her now and again as if she had known her all her life. One day after lunch she suddenly said, “You ought to smile more often—you’ve got pretty teeth; but you forget about them. Don’t forget about them”; and one evening she came into her room just as she was beginning to undress and stood by the fire and said, “Your evening dresses are all wrong. You should have them cut higher, above the collar-bone—or much lower—don’t forget. Don’t forget, you could be charming.”

Every day as soon as the children’s tea was over she fled to her room. The memory of Mrs. Corrie’s little sketch-book had haunted her for days. She had bought a block and brushes, a small box of paints and a book on painting in water colours. For days she painted, secure in the feeling of Mrs. Corrie and Kate occupied with each other. She filled sheet after sheet with swift efforts to recall Brighton skies—sunset, the red mass of the sun, the profile of the cliffs, the sky clear or full of heavy cloud, the darkness of the afternoon sea streaked by a path of gold, bird-specks, above the cliffs, above the sea. The painting was thick and confused, the objects blurred and ran into each other, the image of each recalled object came close before her eyes, shaking her with its sharp reality, her heart and hand shook as she contemplated it, and her body thrilled as she swept her brushes about. She found herself breathing heavily and deeply, sure each time of registering what she saw, sweeping rapidly on until the filled paper confronted her, a confused mass of shapeless images, leaving her angry and cold. Each day what she had done the day before thrilled her afresh and drove her on, and the time she spent in contemplation and hope became the heart of the days as April wore on.

8

On the last day of Jin Tower’s visit, Miriam came in from the garden upon Mrs. Corrie sitting in the hall with her guest. Jin was going and was sorry that she was going. But Miriam saw that her gladness was as great as her sorrow. It always would be. Whatever happened to her. Mrs. Corrie was sitting at her side bent from the waist with her arms stretched out and hands clasped beyond her knees. Miriam was amazed to see how much Mrs. Corrie had been talking, and that she was treating Jin’s departure as if it were a small crisis. There was a touch of soft heat and fussiness in the air. Mrs. Corrie’s features were discomposed. They both glanced at her as she came across the hall and she smiled, awkwardly and half paused. Her mind was turned towards her vision of a great cliff in profile against a still sky with a deep sea brimming to its feet in a placid afterglow; the garden with its lawn and trees, its bushiness and its buttons of bright rosebuds had seemed small and troubled and talkative in comparison. In her slight pause she offered them her vision, but knew as she went on upstairs that her attitude had said, “I am the paid governess. You must not talk to me as you would to each other; I am an inferior and can never be an intimate.” She was glad that Jin had left off coming to her room. She did not want intimacy with anyone if it meant that strained fussiness in the hall. Meeting Mrs. Corrie later on the landing she asked with a sudden sense of inspiration whether she might have her meal in her room, adding in an insincere effort at explanation that she wanted to do some reading up for the children. Mrs. Corrie agreed with an alacrity that gave her a vision of possible freedom ahead and a shock of apprehension. Perhaps she had not succeeded even so far as she thought in living the Newlands social life. She spent the evening writing to Eve, asking her if she remembered sea scenes at Weymouth and Brighton, pushing on and on weighed down by a sense of the urgency of finding out whether to Eve the registration and the recalling of her impressions was a thing that she must either do or lose hold of some essential thing ... she felt that Eve would somehow admire her own stormy emphasis but would not really understand how much it meant to her. She remembered Eve’s comparison of the country round the Greens’ house to Leader landscapes—pictures, and how delightful it had seemed to her that she had such things all round her to look at. But her thoughts of the great brow and downward sweep of cliff and the sea coming up to it was not a picture, it was a thing; her cheeks flared as she searched for a word—it was an experience, perhaps the most important thing in life—far in away from any “glad mask,” a thing belonging to that strange inner life and independent of everybody. Perhaps it was a betrayal, a sort of fat noisy gossiping to speak of it even to Eve. “You’ll think I’m mad,” she concluded, “but I’m not.”

When the letter was finished the Newlands life seemed very remote. She was alone in a strange, luxurious room that did not belong to her, lit by a hard electric light that had been put there by some hardworking mechanic to whom the house was just a house with electric fittings. She felt a touch of the half-numb half-feverish stupor that had been her daily mood at Banbury Park. She would go on teaching the Corrie children, but her evenings in future would be divided between unsuccessful efforts to put down her flaming or peaceful sunset scenes and to explain their importance to Eve.

CHAPTER IX

1

But the next evening when Mr. Corrie came down for the week-end with a party of guests, Mrs. Corrie appeared with swift suddenness in Miriam’s room and glanced at her morning dress.

“I say, missy, you’ll have to hurry up.”

“Oh, I didn’t dress ... the house is full of strangers.”

“No, it isn’t; there’s Mélie and Tom ... Tommy and Mélie.”

“Yes, but I know there are crowds.”

She did not want to meet the Cravens again, and the strangers would turn out to be some sort of people saying certain sorts of things over and over again, and if she went down she would not be able to get away as soon as she knew all about them. She would be fixed; obliged to listen. When anyone spoke to her, grimacing as the patronised governess or saying what she thought and being hated for it.

“Crowds,” she repeated, as Mrs. Corrie placed a large lump in the centre of the blaze.

They had her here, in this beautiful room and looked after her comfort as if she were a guest.

“Nonsensy-nonsense. You must come down and see the fun.” Miriam glanced at her empty table. In the drawer hidden underneath the table-cover were her block and paints. Presently she could, if she held firm, be alone, in a grey space inside this alien room, cold and lonely and with the beginning of something ... dark painful beginning of something that could not come if people were there.... Downstairs, warmth and revelry.

“You must come down and see the fun,” said Mrs. Corrie, getting up from the fire and trailing across the room with bent head. “A nun—a nun in amber satin,” thought Miriam, surveying her back.

“Want you to come down,” said Mrs. Corrie plaintively from the door. Cold air came in from the landing; the warmth of the room stirred to a strange vitality, the light glowed clearer within its ruby globe. The silvery clatter of entrée dishes came up from the hall.

“All right,” said Miriam, turning exultantly to the chest of drawers.

“A victory over myself or some sort of treachery?” ... The long drawer which held her evening things seemed full of wonders. She dragged out a little home-made smocked blouse of pale blue nun’s veiling that had seemed too dowdy for Newlands and put it on over her morning skirt. It shone upon her. Rapidly washing her hands, away from the glamour of the looking-glass, she mentally took stock of her hair, untouched since the morning, the amateur blouse, its crude clear blue hard against the harsh black skirt. Back again at the dressing-table as she dried her hands she found the miracle renewed. The figure that confronted her in the mirror was wrapped in some strange harmonising radiance. She looked at it for a moment as she would have looked at an unknown picture, in tranquil disinterested contemplation. The sound of the gong came softly into the room, bringing her no apprehensive contraction of nerves. She wove its lingering note into the imagined tinkling of an old melody from a wooden musical box. Opening the door before turning out her gas she found a small bunch of hothouse lilies of the valley lying on the writing-table.... Mrs. Corrie—“you must come.”

2

Tucking them into her belt she went slowly downstairs, confused by a picture coming between her and her surroundings like a filmy lantern slide, of Portland Bill lying on a smooth sea in a clear afterglow....

“Quite a madonna,” said Mrs. Staple-Craven querulously. She sat low in her chair, her round gold head on its short stalk standing firmly up from billowy frills of green silk ... “a fat water-lily,” mused Miriam, and went wandering through the great steamy glass-houses at Kew, while the names that had been murmured during the introductions echoed irrelevantly in her brain.

“She must wear her host’s colours sometimes,” said Mr. Corrie quickly and gently.

Miriam glanced her surprise and smiled shyly in response to his shy smile. It was as if the faint radiance that she felt all round her had been outlined by a flashing blade. Mrs. Craven might go on resenting it; she could not touch it again. It steadied and concentrated; flowing from some inexhaustible inner centre, it did not get beyond the circle outlined by the flashing blade, but flowed back on her and out again and back until it seemed as if it must lift her to her feet. Her eyes caught the clear brow and smooth innocently sleeked dark hair of a man at the other end of the table—under the fine level brows was a loudly talking, busily eating face—all the noise of the world, and the brooding grieving unconscious brow above it. Everyone was talking. She glanced. The women showed no foreheads; but their faces were not noisy; they were like the brows of the men, except Mrs. Craven’s. Her silent face was mouthing and complaining aloud all the time.

3

“Old Felix has secured himself the best partner,” Miriam heard someone mutter as she made her fluke, a resounding little cannon and pocket in one stroke. Wandering after her ball she fought against the suggesting voice. It had come from one of the men moving about in the gloom surrounding the radiance cast by the green-shaded lamps upon the long green table. Faces moving in the upper darkness were indistinguishable. The white patch of Mrs. Corrie’s face gleamed from the settee as she sat bent forward with her hands clasped in front of her knees. Beyond her, sitting back under the shadow of the mantelpiece and the marking board was Mrs. Craven, a faint mass of soft green and mealy white. All the other forms were standing or moving in the gloom; standing watchful and silent, the gleaming stems of their cues held in rest, shifting and moving and strolling with uncolliding ordered movements and little murmurs of commentary after the little drama—the sudden snap of the stroke breaking the stillness, the faint thundering roll of the single ball, the click of the concussion, the gentle angular explosion of pieces into a new relation and the breaking of the varying triangle as a ball rolled to its hidden destination held by all the eyes in the room until its rumbling pilgrimage ended out of sight in a soft thud. It was pure joy to Miriam to wander round the table after her ball, sheltered in the gloom, through an endless “grand chain” of undifferentiated figures that passed and repassed without awkwardness or the need for forced exchange; held together and separated by the ceremony of the game. Comments came after each stroke, words and sentences sped and smoothed and polished by the gloom like the easy talking of friends in a deep twilight; but between each stroke were vast intervals of untroubled silent intercourse. The competition of the men, the sense of the desire to win, that rose and strained in the room could not spoil this communion. After a stroke, pondering the balls while the room and the radiance and the darkness moved and flowed and the dim figures settled to a fresh miracle of grouping, it was joy to lean along the board to her ball, keeping punctual appointment with her partner whose jaunty little figure would appear in supporting opposition under the bright light, drawing at his cigarette with a puckering half-smile, awaiting her suggestion and ready with counsel. Doing her best to measure angles and regulate the force of her blow she struck careless little lifting strokes that made her feel as if she danced, and managed three more cannons and a pocket before her little break came to an end.

4

“It must be jolly to smoke in the in-between times,” said Miriam, standing about at a loss during a long break by one of her opponents.

“Yes, you ought to learn to smoke,” responded Mr. Corrie judicially. The quiet smile—the serene offer of companionship, the whole room troubled with the sense of the two parties, the men with whom she was linked in the joyous forward going strife of the game and the women on the sofa, suddenly grown monstrous in their opposition of clothes and kindliness and the fuss of distracting personal insincerities of voice and speech attempting to judge and condemn the roomful of quiet players, shouting aloud to her that she was a fool to be drawn in to talking to men seriously on their own level, a fool to parade about as if she really enjoyed their silly game. “I hate women and they’ve got to know it,” she retorted with all her strength, hitting blindly out towards the sofa, feeling all the contrivances of toilet and coiffure fall in meaningless horrible detail under her blows.

“I do smoke,” she said, leaving her partner’s side and going boldly to the sofa corner. “Ragbags, bundles of pretence,” she thought, as she confronted the women. They glanced up with cunning eyes. They looked small and cringing. She rushed on, sweeping them aside.... Who had made them so small and cheated, and for all their smiles so angry? What was it they wanted? What was it women wanted that always made them so angry?

“Would you mind if I smoked?” she asked in a clear gay tone, cutting herself from Mrs. Corrie with a wrench as she faced her glittering frightened eyes.

“Of course not, my dear lady—I don’t mind, if you don’t,” she said, tweaking affectionately at Miriam’s skirt. “Ain’t she a gay dog, Mélie, ain’t she a gay dog!”

5

“It’s a pleasure to see you smoke,” murmured Mr. Corrie fervently, “you’re the first woman I’ve seen smoke con amore.”

Contemplating the little screwed-up appreciative smile on the features of her partner, bunched to the lighting of his own cigarette, Miriam discharged a double stream of smoke violently through her nostrils—breaking out at last a public defiance of the freemasonry of women. “I suppose I’m a new woman—I’ve said I am now, anyhow,” she reflected, wondering in the background of her determination how she would reconcile the rôle with her work as a children’s governess. “I’m not in their crowd, anyhow; I despise their silly secret,” she pursued, feeling out ahead towards some lonely solution of her difficulty that seemed to come shapelessly towards her, but surely—the happy weariness of conquest gave her a sense of some unknown strength in her.

For the rest of the evening the group in the sofa-corner presented her a frontage of fawning and flattery.

6

Coming down with the children to lunch the next day, Miriam found the room dark and chill in the bright midday. It was as if it were empty. But if it had been empty it would have been beautiful in the still light and tranquil. There was a dark cruel tide in the room, she sought in vain for a foothold. A loud busy voice was talking from Mr. Corrie’s place at the head of the table. Mr. Staple-Craven, busy with cold words to hide the truth. He paused as the nursery trio came in and settled at the table and then shouted softly and suddenly at Mrs. Corrie, “What’s Corrie having?”

“Biscuits,” chirped Mrs. Corrie eagerly, “biscuits and sally in the study.” She sat forward, gathering herself to disperse the gloom. But Mrs. Craven’s deep voice drowned her unspoken gaieties ... ah—he’s not gone away, thought Miriam rapidly, he’s in the house....

“Best thing for biliousness,” gonged Mrs. Craven, and Mr. Craven busily resumed.

“It’s only the fisherman who knows anything, anything whatever about the silver stream. Necessarily. Necessarily. It is the—the concentration, the—the absorption of the passion that enables him to see. Er, the fisherman, the poet-tantamount; exchangeable terms. Fishing is, indeed one might say——”

The men of the party were devouring their food with the air of people just about to separate to fulfil urgent engagements. They bent and gobbled busily and cast smouldering glances about the table, as if with their eyes they would suggest important mysteries brooding above their animated muzzles.

Miriam’s stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief. Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate. That’s men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty, that’s men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real. All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a man doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree he’s just a blank bony conceitedly thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face below, going on eating—and going off somewhere. Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan’t kill me.... I’ll shatter his conceited brow—make him see ... two sides to every question ... a million sides ... no questions, only sides ... always changing. Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover—cool and calm. Damn them all—all men.

7

“Fee ought to be out here,” said Mrs. Corrie, moving her basket chair to face away from the sun.

The garden blazed in the fresh warm air. But there was no happiness in it. Everything was lost and astray. The house-party had dispersed and disappeared. Mrs. Corrie sat and strolled about the garden, joyless, as if weighed down by some immovable oppression. If Mr. Corrie were to come out, and sit there too it would be worse. It was curious to think that the garden was his at all. He would come feebly out, looking ill and they would all sit, uneasy and afraid. But Mrs. Corrie wanted him to come out, knew he ought to be there. It was she who had thought of it. It was intolerable to think of his coming. Yet he had been “crazy mad” about her for five years. Five years and then this. Whose fault was it? His or hers? Or was marriage always like that? Perhaps that was why she and Mrs. Craven had laughed when they were asked whether marriage was a failure. Mrs. Craven had no children. Nothing to think about but stars and spirits and her food and baths and little silk dresses and Mr. Craven treated her as if she were a child he had got tired of petting. She did not even go fishing with him. She was lying down in her room and tea would be taken up to her. At least she thought of herself and seemed to enjoy life. But she was getting fatter and fatter. Mrs. Corrie did not want anything for herself, except for the fun of getting things. She cared only for the children and when they grew up they would have nothing to talk to her about. Sybil would have thoughts behind her ugly strong face. She would tell them to no one. The boy would adore her, until his wife whom he would adore came between them. So there was nothing for women in marriage and children. Because they had no thoughts. Their husbands grew to hate them because they had no thoughts. But if a woman had thoughts a man would not be “silly” about her for five years. And Mrs. Corrie had her garden. She would always have that, when he was not there.

“If you were to go and ask him,” said Mrs. Corrie, brushing out her dress with her hands, “he’d come out.”

“Me!” said Miriam in amazement.

“Yes, go on, my dear, you see; he’ll come.”

“But perhaps he doesn’t want to,” said Miriam, suddenly feeling that she was playing a familiar part in a novel and wanting to feel quite sure she was reading her rôle aright.

“You go and try,” laughed Mrs. Corrie gently. “Make him come out.”

“I’ll tell him you wish him to come,” said Miriam gravely, getting to her feet. “All right,” she thought, “if I have more influence over him than you it’s not my fault, not anybody’s fault, but how horrid you must feel.”

8

Miriam’s trembling fingers gave a frightened fumbling tap at the study door. “Come in,” said Mr. Corrie officially, and coughed a loose, wheezy cough. He was sitting by the fire in one of the huge armchairs and didn’t look up as she entered. She stood with the door half closed behind her, fighting against her fear and the cold heavy impression of his dull grey dressing-gown and the grey rug over his knees.

“It’s so lovely in the garden,” she said, fervently fixing her eyes on the small white face, a little puffy under its grizzled hair. He looked stiffly in her direction.

“The sun is so warm,” she went on hurriedly. “Mrs. Corrie thought——” she stopped. Of course the man was too ill to be worried. For, an eternity she stood, waiting. Mr. Corrie coughed his little cough and turned again to the fire. If only she could sit down in the other chair, saying nothing and just be there. He looked so unspeakably desolate. He hated being there, not able to play or work.

“I hate being ill,” she said at last, “it always seems such waste of time.” She knew she had borrowed that from someone and that it would only increase the man’s impatience. “I always have to act and play parts,” she thought angrily—and called impatiently to her everyday vision of him to dispel the obstructive figure in the armchair.

“Umph,” said Mr. Corrie judicially.

“You could have a chair,” she ventured, “and just sit quietly.”

“No thanks, I’m not coming out.” He turned a kind face in her direction without meeting her eyes.

“You have such a nice room,” said Miriam vaguely, getting to the door.

“Do you like it?” It was his everyday voice, and Miriam stopped at the door without turning.

“It’s so absolutely your own,” she said.

Mr. Corrie laughed. “That’s a strange definition of charm.”

“I didn’t say charming. I said your own.”

Mr. Corrie laughed out. “Because it’s mine it’s nice, but it is, for the same reason, not charming.”

“You’re tying me up into something I haven’t said. There’s a fallacy in what you have just said, somewhere.”

“You’ll never be tied up in anything, mademoiselle—you’ll tie other people up. But there was no fallacy.”

“No verbal fallacy,” said Miriam eagerly, “a fallacy of intention, deliberate misreading.”

“No wonder you think the sun would do me good.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m such a miscreant.”

“Oh no, you’re not,” said Miriam comfortingly, turning round. “I don’t want you to come out”—she advanced boldly and stirred the fire. “I always like to be alone when I’m ill.”

“That’s better,” said Mr. Corrie.

“Good-bye,” breathed Miriam, getting rapidly to the door ... poor wretched man ... wanting quiet kindness.

“Thank you; good-bye,” said Mr. Corrie gently.

9

“Then you’d say, Corrie,” said Mr. Staple-Craven, as they all sat down to dinner on Sunday, evening ... now comes flattery, thought Miriam calmly—nothing mattered, the curtains were back, the light not yet gone from the garden and birds were fluting and chirruping out there on the lawn where she had played tennis all the afternoon—at home there was the same light in the little garden and Sarah and Harriett were there in happiness, she would see them soon and meantime, the wonder, the fresh rosebuds, this year’s, under the clear soft lamplight.

“You’d say that no one was to blame for the accident.”

“The cause of the accident was undoubtedly the signalman’s sudden attack of illness.”

Pause. “It sounds,” thought Miriam, “as if he were reading from the Book of Judgment. It isn’t true either. Perhaps a judgment can never be true.” She pondered to the singing of her blood.

“In other words,” said one of the younger men, in a narrow nasal sneering clever voice, “it was a purely accidental accident.”

“Purely,” gurgled Mr. Corrie, in a low, pleased tone.

“They think they’re really beginning,” mused Miriam, rousing herself.

“A genuine accident within the meaning of the act,” blared Mr. Craven.

“An actident,” murmured Mr. Corrie.

“In that case,” said another man, “I mean since the man was discovered ill, not drunk, by a doctor in his box, all the elaborate legal proceedings would appear to be rather—superfluous.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Mr. Corrie testily.

Miriam listened gladly to the anger in his voice, watching the faint movement of the window curtains and waiting for the justification of the law.

“The thing must be subject to a detailed inquiry before the man can be cleared.”

“He might have felt ill before he took up his duties—you’d hardly get him to admit that.”

“Lawyers can get people to admit anything,” said Mr. Craven cheerfully, and broke the silence that followed his sally by a hooting monotonous recitative which he delivered, swaying right and left from his hips, “that is to say—they by beneficently pursuing unexpected—quite unexpected bypaths—suddenly confront—their—their examinees—with the truth—the Truth.”

“It’s quite a good point to suggest that the chap felt ill earlier in the day—that’s one of the things you’d have to find out. You’d have, at any rate, to know all the circumstances of the seizure.”

“Indigestible food,” said Miriam, “or badly cooked food.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Corrie, his face clearing, “that’s an excellent refinement.”

“In that case the cause of the accident would be the cook.”

Mr. Corrie laughed delightedly.

“I don’t say that because I’m interested, but because I wanted to take sides with him,” thought Miriam, “the others know that and resent it and now I’m interested.”

“Perhaps,” she said, feeling anxiously about the incriminated cook, “the real cause then would be a fault in her upbringing, I mean he may have lately married a young woman whose mother had not taught her cooking.”

“Oh, you can’t go back further than the cook,” said Mr. Corrie finally.

“But the cause,” she persisted, in a low, anxious voice, “is the sum total of all the circumstances.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Corrie impenetrably, with a hard face—“you can’t take the thing back into the mists of the past.”

He dropped her and took up a lead coming from a man at the other end of the table.

“Oh,” thought Miriam coldly, appraising him with a glance, the slightly hollow temples, the small skull, a little flattened, the lack of height in the straight forehead, why had she not noticed that before?—the general stinginess of the head balancing the soft keen eyes and whimsical mouth—“that’s you; you won’t, you can’t look at anything from the point of view of life as a whole”—she shivered and drew away from the whole spectacle and pageant of Newlands’ life. It all had this behind it, a man, able to do and decide things who looked about like a ferret for small clever things, causes, immediate near causes that appeared to explain, and explained nothing and had nothing to do with anything. Her hot brain whirled back—signalmen, in bad little houses with bad cooking—tinned foods—they’re a link—they bring all sorts of things into their signal boxes. They ought to bring the fewest possible dangerous things. Something ought to be done.

Lawyers were quite happy, pleased with themselves if they made some one person guilty—put their finger on him. “Can’t go back into the mists of the past ... you didn’t understand, you’re not capable of understanding any real movements of thought. I always knew it. You think—in propositions. Can’t go back. Of course you can go back, and round and up and everywhere. Things as a whole ... you understand nothing. We’ve done. That’s you. Mr. Corrie—a leading Q.C. Heavens.”

In that moment Miriam felt that she left Newlands for ever. She glanced at Mrs. Corrie and Mrs. Craven—bright beautiful coloured birds, fading slowly year by year in the stifling atmosphere, the hard brutal laughing complacent atmosphere of men’s minds ... men’s minds, staring at things, ignorantly, knowing “everything” in an irritating way and yet ignorant.