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.”
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.
V
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.
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 textbook, 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.
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
