“Is there a library here?” she said with beating heart.
She stood so long reading and rereading half familiar titles, Cometh Up as a Flower, Not Like Other Girls, The Heir of Redcliffe, books that she and Harriett had read and books that she felt were of a similar type, that tea was already on the schoolroom table when she reached Wordsworth House with an unknown volume by Mrs. Hungerford under her arm. Hiding it upstairs, she came down to tea and sat recovering her composure over her paper-covered Cinq-Mars, a relic of the senior Oxford examination now grown suddenly rich and amazing. Today it could not hold her. The Madcap was upstairs, and beyond it an unlimited supply of twopenny volumes and Ouida. Red-bound volumes of Ouida on the bottom shelf had sent her eyes quickly back to the safety of the upper rows. Through the whole of teatime she was quietly aware of a discussion going on at the back of her mind as to who it was who had told her that Ouida’s books were bad; evil books. She remembered her father’s voice saying that Ouida was an extremely able woman, quite a politician. Then of course her books were all right, for grown-up people. It must have been someone at a dance who had made her curious about them, someone she had forgotten. In any case, whatever they were, there was no one now to prevent her reading them if she chose. She would read them if she chose. Write to Eve about it first. No. Certainly not. Eve might say “Better not, my dear. You will regret it if you do. You won’t be the same.” Eve was different. She must not be led by Eve in any case. She must leave off being led by Eve—or anybody. The figures sitting round the table, bent over their books, quietly disinclined for conversation or mischief under the shrewd eye of Miss Haddie, suddenly looked exciting and mysterious. But perhaps the man in the shop would be shocked. It would be impossible to ask for them; unless she could pretend she did not know anything about them.
For the last six weeks of the summer term she sat up night after night propped against her upright pillow and bolster under the gas jet reading her twopenny books in her silent room. Almost every night she read until two o’clock. She felt at once that she was doing wrong; that the secret novel-reading was a thing she could not confess, even to Miss Haddie. She was spending hours of the time that was meant for sleep, for restful preparation for the next day’s work, in a “vicious circle” of self-indulgence. It was sin. She had read somewhere that sin promises a satisfaction that it is unable to fulfil. But she found when the house was still and the trams had ceased jingling up and down outside that she grew steady and cool and that she rediscovered the self she had known at home, where the refuge of silence and books was always open. Perhaps that self, leaving others to do the practical things, erecting a little wall of unapproachability between herself and her family that she might be free to dream alone in corners had always been wrong. But it was herself, the nearest most intimate self she had known. And the discovery that it was not dead, that her six months in the German school and the nine long months during which Banbury Park life had drawn a veil even over the little slices of holiday freedom, had not even touched it, brought her warm moments of reassurance. It was not perhaps a “good” self, but it was herself, her own familiar secretly happy and rejoicing self—not dead. Her hands lying on the coverlet knew it. They were again at these moments her own old hands, holding very firmly to things that no one might touch or even approach too nearly, things, everything, the great thing that would some day communicate itself to someone through these secret hands with the strangely thrilling fingertips. Holding them up in the gaslight she dreamed over their wisdom. They knew everything and held their secret, even from her. She eyed them, communed with them, passionately trusted them. They were not “artistic” or “clever” hands. The fingers did not “taper” nor did the outstretched thumb curl back on itself like a frond—like Nan Babington’s. They were long, the tips squarish and firmly padded, the palm square and bony and supple, and the large thumb joint stood away from the rest of the hand like the thumb joint of a man. The right hand was larger than the left, kindlier, friendlier, wiser. The expression of the left hand was less reassuring. It was a narrower, lighter hand, more flexible, less sensitive and more even in its touch—more smooth and manageable in playing scales. It seemed to belong to her much less than the right; but when the two were firmly interlocked they made a pleasant curious whole, the right clasping more firmly,
