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.
IX
But the next evening when Mr. Corrie came down for the weekend 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 homemade 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.”
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 glasshouses 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
