… If you had loved, if you loved, you could die, laughing, gasping out your life on a battlefield, fading by inches in a fever-swamp, or living on, going about seamed and old and ill. Whatever happened to you, if you had cared, fearing nothing, neither death nor hell. God came. He would welcome and forgive you. Life, struggle, pain. Happy laughter with twisted lips—all waiting somewhere outside, beyond. It would come. It must be made to come.
Who was there in the world? Ted had failed. Ted belonged to the Rosa Nouchette Carey world. He would marry one of those women. Bob knew. Bob Greville’s profile was real. Sitting on the wide stairs at the Easter Subscription Dance, his soft fine white hair standing up, the straight line of polished forehead, the fine nose and compressed lips, the sharp round chin with the three firm folds underneath it, the point of his collar cutting across them, the keen blue eyes looking straight out ahead, across Australia. The whole face listening. He had been listening to her nearly all the evening. Now and again quiet questions. She could go on talking to him whenever she liked. Go to him and go on talking, and talking, safely, being understood. Talking on and on. But he was old. Living old and alone in chambers in Adam Street—Adelphi.
One day just before the end of the summer term, Miss Perne asked Miriam to preside over the large schoolroom for the morning. The first and second-class girls were settled there at their written examination in English history. Rounding the schoolroom door she stood for a moment in the doorway. The sunlight poured in through the wide bay window and the roomful of quiet girls seemed like a field. Jessie Wheeler’s voice broke the silence. “It’s the Hen,” she shouted gently. “It’s the blessed Hen! Oh, come on. You going to sit with us?”
“Yes. Be quiet,” said Miriam.
“Oh, thank goodness,” groaned Jessie, supported by groans and murmurs from all over the room.
“Be quiet, girls, and get on with your papers,” said Miriam in a tone of acid detachment from the top of her tide. She sat feeling that her arms were round the entire roomful, that each girl struggling alone with the list of questions was resting against her breast. “I’m going away from them. I must be going away from them,” ran her thoughts regretfully. “They can’t keep me. This is the utmost. I’ve won. There’ll never be anything more than this, here.” It would always be the same—with different girls. Certainty. Even the sunlight paid a sort of homage to the fathomless certainty she felt. The sunlight in this little schoolroom was telling her of other sunlights, vast and unbroken, somewhere—coming, her own sunlights, when she should have wrenched herself away. It was there; she glanced up again and again to watch it breaking and splashing all over the room. It would come again, but how differently. Quite soon. She might have spared herself all her agonising. The girls did not know where she belonged. They were holding her. But she would go away, to some huge open space. Leave them—ah, it was unkind. But she had left them already in spirit.
If they could all get up together now and sing, let their voices peal together up and up, throw all the books out of the window, they might go on together, forward into the sunshine, but they would not want to do that. Hardly any of them would want to do that. They would look at her with knowing eyes, and look at the door, and stay where they were.
The room was very close. Polly Allen and Eunice Dupont, sitting together at a little card-table in the darkest corner of the room, were whispering. With beating heart Miriam got up and went and stood before them. “You two are talking,” she said with her eyes on the thickness of Polly’s shoulders as she sat in profile to the room. Eunice, opposite her, against the wall, flashed up at her her beautiful fugitive grin as from the darkness of a wood. History, thought Miriam. What has Eunice to do with history, laws, Henry II, the English Constitution? “You don’t talk,” she said coldly, feeling as she watched her that Eunice’s pretty clothes were stripped away and she were stabbing at her soft rounded body, “at examinations. Can’t you see that?” Eunice’s pale face grew livid. “First because it isn’t fair and also because it disturbs other people.” You can tell all the people who cheat by their smile, she reflected on her way back. Eunice chuckled serenely two or three times. “What have these North London girls to do with studies?” … There was not a single girl like Eunice at Barnes. Even the very pretty girls were … refined.
That afternoon Miriam spent her hour of leisure in calling on the Brooms to enquire for Grace, who had been ill the whole of the term. She found the house after some difficulty in one of a maze of little rows and crescents just off the tram-filled main road. “She’s almost perfect—almost perfection,” said Mrs. Philps, the Aunt Lucy Miriam had heard of and seen in church.
They had been together in the little drawing-room talking about Grace from the moment when Miriam was shown in to Mrs. Philps sitting darning a duster in a low chair by the closed conservatory door. The glazed closed door with the little strips of window on either side giving on to a crowded conservatory made the little room seem dark. To Miriam it seemed horribly
