“Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.” Who said that? Was it true? Dreadful. It couldn’t be. So many people had seen moonlit gardens, together. All the happy people who were sure of each other. “I say, Harriett,” she said at the top of her voice, bringing Harriett curvetting in the road just in front of her. “I say, listen.” Harriett ran up the remaining strips of road and out on to the Heath. It was ablaze with sunlight—as the river and the trees had been yesterday—a whole day of light and Eve on her way home, almost home. Harriett must not know how she was rushing to Eve; with what tingling fingers. “Oh, what I was going to ask you was whether you can see the moonlight like it is when you are alone, when Gerald is there.”
“… It isn’t the same as when you are alone,” said Harriett quietly, arranging the cuff of her glove.
“Do explain what you mean.”
“Well, it’s different.”
“I see. You don’t know how.”
“It’s quite different.”
“Does Gerald like the moonlight?”
“I dunno. I never asked him.”
“Fancy the Roehampton people living up here all the time.”
“There’s their old washing going flip-flap over there.”
Harriett was finding out that she was back in the house with Eve.
“Let’s rush to the windmill. Let’s sing.”
“Come on; only we can’t rush and sing too.”
“Yes we can, come on.” Running up over hillocks and stumbling through sandy gorse-grown hollows they sang a hunting song, Miriam leading with the short galloping phrases, Harriett’s thinner voice dropping in, broken and uncertain, with a strange brave sadness in it that went to Miriam’s heart.
“Eve, you look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady in these things. Don’t you feel like it?” Eve stopped near the landing window and stood in her light green canvas dress with its pale green silk sleeves shedding herself over Miriam from under her rose-trimmed white chip hat. Miriam was carrying her light coat and all the small litter of her journey. “Go on up,” she said, “I want to talk,” and Eve hurried on, Miriam stumblingly following her, holding herself in, eyes and ears wide for the sight and sound of the slender figure flitting upstairs through the twilight. The twilight wavered and seemed to ebb and flow, suggesting silent dawn and full midday, and the house rang with a soundless music.
“It was Mrs. Wallace who suggested my wearing all my best things for the journey,” panted Eve; “they don’t get crushed with packing and they needn’t get dirty if you’re careful.”
“You look exactly like Dudley’s gracious lady. You know you do. You know it perfectly well.”
“They do seem jolly now I’m back. They don’t seem anything down there. Just ordinary with everybody in much grander things.”
“How do you mean, grander? What sort of things?”
“Oh, all sorts of lovely white dresses.”
“It is extraordinary about all those white dresses,” said Miriam emphatically, pushing her way after Eve into Sarah’s bedroom. “Can I come in? I’m coming in. Sarah says it’s because men like them and she gets simply sick of girls in white and cream dresses all over the place in the summer, and it’s a perfect relief to see anyone in a colour in the sun. They have red sunshades sometimes, but Sarah says that’s not enough; you want people in colours. I wonder if there’s anything in it?”
“Of course there is,” said Sarah, releasing the last strap of Eve’s trunk.
“They’d all put on coloured things if it weren’t for that.”
“Men tell them.”
“Do they?”
“The engaged men tell them—or brothers.”
“I can’t think how you get to know these things, sober Sally.”
“Oh, you can tell.”
“Well, then, why do men like silly white and cream dresses, pasty, whitewashy clothes altogether?”
“It’s something they want; it looks different to them.”
“Sarah knows all sorts of things,” said Miriam excitedly, watching the confusion of the room from the windows. “She says she knows why the Pooles look down and smirk; their dimples and the line of their chins; that men admire them looking down like that. Isn’t it frightful. Disgusting. And men don’t seem to see through them.”
“It’s those kind of girls get on best.”
Miriam sighed.
“Oh well, don’t let’s think about them. Not tonight, anyhow,” cooed Eve.
“Sarah says there are much more awful reasons. I can’t think how she finds them all out. Sober Sally. I know she’s right. It’s too utterly sickening somehow, for words.”
“Mim.”
“Pooh—barooo, baroooo.”
“Mim—”
“Damnation.”
“Mimmy—Jim.”
“I said damnation.”
“Oh, it’s all right. What have we got to do with horrid knowing people.”
“Well, they’re there, all the time. You can’t get away from them. They’re all over the place. Either the knowing ones or the simpering ones. It’s all the same in the end.”
Eve quietly began to unpack. “Oh well,” she smiled, “we’re
