At the end of a fairly hard day’s work it was certainly something of an effort to clear one’s room, to pull the mattress off one’s bed, and lay it on the floor, to fill a pitcher with cold coffee, and to sweep a long table clear for plates and cups and saucers, with pyramids of little pink biscuits between them; but when these alterations were effected, Mary felt a lightness of spirit come to her, as if she had put off the stout stuff of her working hours and slipped over her entire being some vesture of thin, bright silk. She knelt before the fire and looked out into the room. The light fell softly, but with clear radiance, through shades of yellow and blue paper, and the room, which was set with one or two sofas resembling grassy mounds in their lack of shape, looked unusually large and quiet. Mary was led to think of the heights of a Sussex down,n and the swelling green circle of some camp of ancient warriors. The moonlight would be falling there so peacefully now, and she could fancy the rough pathway of silver upon the wrinkled skin of the sea.
‘And here we are,’ she said, half aloud, half satirically, yet with evident pride, ‘talking about art.’
She pulled a basket containing balls of differently coloured wools and a pair of stockings which needed darning towards her, and began to set her fingers to work; while her mind, reflecting the lassitude of her body, went on perversely, conjuring up visions of solitude and quiet, and she pictured herself laying aside her knitting and walking out on to the down, and hearing nothing but the sheep cropping the grass close to the roots, while the shadows of the little trees moved very slightly this way and that in the moonlight, as the breeze went through them. But she was perfectly conscious of her present situation, and derived some pleasure from the reflection that she could rejoice equally in solitude, and in the presence of the many very different people who were now making their way, by divers paths, across London to the spot where she was sitting.
As she ran her needle in and out of the wool, she thought of the various stages in her own life which made her present position seem the culmination of successive miracles. She thought of her clerical father in his country parsonage, and of her mother’s death, and of her own determination to obtain education, and of her college life, which had merged, not so very long ago, in the wonderful maze of London, which still seemed to her, in spite of her constitutional level-headedness, like a vast electric light, casting radiance upon the myriads of men and women who crowded round it. And here she was at the very centre of it all, that centre which was constantly in the minds of people in remote Canadian forests and on the plains of India, when their thoughts turned to England. The nine mellow strokes, by which she was now apprised of the hour, were a message from the great clock at Westminstero itself. As the last of them died away, there was a firm knocking on her own door, and she rose and opened it. She returned to the room, with a look of steady pleasure in her eyes, and she was talking to Ralph Denham, who followed her.
‘Alone?’ he said, as if he were pleasantly surprised by that fact.
‘I am sometimes alone,’ she replied.
‘But you expect a great many people,’ he added, looking round him. ‘It’s like a room on the stage. Who is it to- night?’
‘William Rodney, upon the Elizabethan use of metaphor. I expect a good solid paper, with plenty of quotations from the classics.’
Ralph warmed his hands at the fire, which was flapping bravely in the grate, while Mary took up her stocking again.
‘I suppose you are the only woman in London who darns her own stockings,’ he observed.
‘I’m only one of a great many thousands really,’ she replied,
‘though I must admit that I was thinking myself very remarkable when you came in. And now that you’re here I don’t think myself remarkable at all. How horrid of you! But I’m afraid you’re much more remarkable than I am. You’ve done much more than I’ve done.’
‘If that’s your standard, you’ve nothing to be proud of,’ said Ralph, grimly.
‘Well, I must reflect with Emersonp that it’s being and not doing that matters,’ she continued.
‘Emerson?’ Ralph exclaimed, with derision. ‘You don’t mean to say you read Emerson?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t Emerson; but why shouldn’t I read Emerson?’ she asked, with a tinge of anxiety.
‘There’s no reason that I know of. It’s the combination that’s odd—books and stockings. The combination is very odd.’ But it seemed to recommend itself to him. Mary gave a little laugh, expressive of happiness, and the particular stitches that she was now putting into her work appeared to her to be done with singular grace and felicity. She held out the stocking and looked at it approvingly.
‘You always say that,’ she said. ‘I assure you it’s a common “combination”, as you call it, in the houses of the clergy. The only thing that’s odd about me is that I enjoy them both—Emerson and the stocking.’
A knock was heard, and Ralph exclaimed:
‘Damn those people! I wish they weren’t coming!’
‘It’s only Mr Turner, on the floor below,’ said Mary, and she felt grateful to Mr Turner for having alarmed Ralph, and for having given a false alarm.
‘Will there be a crowd?’ Ralph asked, after a pause.
‘There’ll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick Osborne, and Septimus,1 and all that set. Katharine Hilbery is coming, by the way, so William Rodney told me.’
‘Katharine Hilbery!’ Ralph exclaimed.
‘You know her?’ Mary asked, with some surprise.
‘I went to a tea-party at her house.’
Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was not at all unwilling to exhibit proofs of the extent of his knowledge. He described the scene with certain additions and exaggerations which interested Mary very much.
‘But, in spite of what you say, I do admire her,’ she said. ‘I’ve only seen her once or twice, but she seems to me to be what one calls a “personality”.’
‘I didn’t mean to abuse her. I only felt that she wasn’t very sympathetic to me.’
