Here, just for these few hours, laughing at Ted. A phrase flashed through her brain, “He’s brought Ted to his senses.” She flushed and laughed vaguely and danced with a feeling of tireless strength and gaiety. She knew the phrase was not her own. It was one Nan Babington could have used. It excited her. It meant that real things were going to happen, she could bear herself proudly in the room. She rippled complacently at Max. The room was full of whirling forms, swelling and shrinking as they crossed and recrossed the line between the clear vision rimmed by her glasses and the surrounding bright confusion. Swift, rhythmic movement, unbroken and unjostled, told her how well they were dancing. She was secure, landed in life, dancing carelessly out and out to a life of her own.
“I go; I see you again in a year,” said Max suddenly, drawing up near the door where Mrs. Henderson stood sipping coffee with Sarah and Bennett.
“Where is Burton?” he asked in the midst of his thanks and leave-taking.
They all hesitated. Miriam suddenly found herself in the presence of a tribunal.
Bennett’s careless “Oh, he’s gone; couldn’t stay,” followed her as she flung upstairs to Meg Wedderburn’s empty room. Why had her mother looked so self-conscious and Sarah avoided her eye … standing there like a little group of conspirators.
People were always inventing things. “Bother—damnational silliness,” she muttered, and began rapidly calculating. Ted gone away. Little Ted hurt and angry. Tomorrow. Perhaps he wouldn’t come. If he didn’t she wouldn’t see him before she went. The quiet little bead of ruby shaded gas reproached her. Meg’s eyes would be sad and reproachful in this quiet neatness. Terror seized her. She wouldn’t see him. He had finished his work at the Institution. It was the big Norwich job next week.
III
Miriam propped The Story of Adèle open against the three Bibles on the dressing-table. It would be wasteful to read it upstairs. It was the only storybook amongst the rows of volumes which filled the shelves in the big schoolroom and would have to last her for teatime reading the whole term. The Fleurs de l’Eloquence? Shiny brown leather covered with little gold buds and tendrils, fresh and new although the parchment pages were yellow with age. The Fleurs were so short … that curious page signed “Froissart” with long s’s, coming to an end just as the picture of the French court was getting clear and interesting. That other thing, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Fascinating. But it would take so much reading, on and on forgetting everything; all the ordinary things, seeing things in some new way, some way that fascinated people for a moment if you tried to talk about it and then made them very angry, made them hate and suspect you. Impossible to take it out and have it on the schoolroom table for teatime reading. What had made the Pernes begin allowing teatime reading? Being shy and finding it difficult to keep conversation going with the girls for so long? They never did talk to the girls. Perhaps because they did not see through them and understand them. North London girls. So different from the Fairchild family and the sort of girls they had been accustomed to when they were young. Anyhow, they hardly ever had to talk to them. Not at breakfast or dinnertime when they were all three there; and at teatime when there was only one of them, there were always the books. How sensible. On Sunday afternoons, coming smiling into the schoolroom, one of them each Sunday—perhaps the others were asleep—reading aloud; the Fairchild family, smooth and good and happy, everyone in the book surrounded with a sort of light, going on and on and on towards heaven, teatime seeming so nice and mean and ordinary afterwards—or a book about a place in the north of England called Saltcoats, brine, and a vicarage and miners; the people in the book horrible, not lit up, talking about things and being gloomy and not always knowing what to do, never really sure about Heaven like the Fairchild family, black brackish book. The Fairchild Family was golden and gleaming.
The Anatomy of Melancholy would not be golden like The Fairchild Family … “the cart was now come alongside a wood which was exceedingly shady and beautiful”; “good manners and civility make everybody lovely”; but it would be round and real, not just chilly and moaning like Saltcoats. The title would be enough to keep one going at teatime. Anat‑omy of Mel‑ancholy, and the look of the close-printed pages and a sentence here and there. The Pernes would not believe she really wanted it there on the table. The girls would stare. When The Story of Adèle was finished she would have to find some other book; or borrow one. Nancie Wilkie, sitting at tea with her back to the closed piano facing the great bay of dark green-blinded window, reading Nicholas Nickleby. Just the very one of all the Dickens volumes that would be likely to come into her hands. Impossible to borrow it when Nancie had finished with it. Impossible to read a book with such a title. David Copperfield was all right; and The Pickwick Papers. Little Dorritt—A Tale of Two Cities—The Old Curiosity Shop. There was something suspicious about these, too.
Adèle—the story of Adèle. The book had hard, unpleasant covers with some thin cottony material—bright lobelia blue—strained over them and fraying out at the corners. Over the front of the cover were little garlands and festoons of faded gold, and
