“Eve! What a perfectly beastly thing to say.”
“It isn’t, my dear,” said Eve pensively. “You should see yourself; you do.”
“Sally, do I?”
“Of course you do,” giggled Eve quietly, “as much as anybody.”
“Then I’m the most crawling thing on the face of the earth,” thought Miriam, turning silently to the treetops looming softly just outside the window; “and the worst of it is I only know it at moments now and again.” The treetops serene with some happy secret cast her off, and left her standing with groping crisping fingers unable to lift the misery that pressed upon her heart. “God, what a filthy world! God what a filthy world!” she muttered. “Everyone hemmed and hemmed and hemmed into it.” Harriett came in and stepped up on to the high canopied bed. “Ullo,” she said in general, sitting herself up tailor-fashion in the middle of the bed so that the bright twilight fell full upon her head and the breast and shoulders of her light silk-sleeved dress. Humming shreds of a violin obligato, Eve rustled out layer after layer of paper-swathed garments, to be gathered up by Sarah moving solidly about between the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in her rather heavy boots. There would not be any talk. But silently the room filled and overflowed. Turning at last from her window, Miriam glanced at her sisters and let her thoughts drop into the flowing tide. Harry, sitting there sharp and upright in the fading light, coming in to them with her future life streaming out behind her spreading and shining and rippling, herself the radiant point of that wonderful life, actually there, neatly enthroned amongst them, one of them, drawing them all with her out towards its easy security; Eve, happy with her wardrobe of dainty things, going fearlessly forward to some unseen fate, not troubling about it. Sarah’s strange clean clear channel of wisdom. Where would it lead? It would always drive straight through everything.
All these things meant that the mere simple awfulness of things at home had changed. These three girls she had known so long as fellow-prisoners, and who still bore at moments in their eyes, their movements, the marks of the terrors and uncertainties amongst which they had all grown up, were going on, out into life, scored and scarred, but alive and changeable, able to become quite new. Memories of strange crises and the ageing deadening shifts they had invented to tide them over humiliating situations were here crowded in the room together with them all. But these memories were no longer as they had so often been, the principal thing in the room whenever they were all gathered silently together. If Eve and Harriett had got away from the past and now had happy eyes and mouths. … Sarah’s solid quiet cheerfulness, now grown so large and free that it seemed even when she was stillest to knock your mind about like something in a harlequinade. … Why had they not all known in the past that they would change? Why had they been so oppressed whenever they stopped to think?
Those American girls in Little Women and Good Wives made fun out of everything. But they had never had to face real horrors and hide them from everybody, mewed up.
When it was nearly dark Sarah lit the gas. Harriett had gone downstairs. Miriam lowered the Venetian blinds, shutting out the summer. Tomorrow it would be there again, waiting for them when they woke in the morning. In her own and Harriett’s room the daylight would be streaming in through the Madras muslin curtains, everything in the room very silent and distinct; nothing to be heard but the little flutterings of birds under the eaves. You could listen to it forever if you kept perfectly still. When you drew back the curtains the huge day would be standing outside clear with gold and blue and dense with trees and flowers.
Sarah’s face was uneasy. She seemed to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes. Presently she faced them, sitting on a low rocking chair with her tightly clasped hands stretched out beyond her knees. She glanced fearfully from one to the other and bit her lips. “What now,” thought Miriam. The anticipated holidays disappeared. Of course. She might have known they would. For a moment she felt sick, naked and weak. Then she braced herself to meet the shock. I must sit tight, I must sit tight and not show anything. Eve’s probably praying. Oh, make haste, Sally, and get it over.
“What’s the matter, Sally?” said Eve in a low voice.
“Oh, Eve and Mim, I’m awfully sorry.”
“You’d better tell us at once,” said Eve, crimsoning.
“Haven’t you noticed anything?”
Miriam looked at Sarah’s homely prosperous shape. It couldn’t be anything. It was a nightmare. She waited, pinching her wrist.
“What is it, Sally?” breathed Eve, tapping her green-clad knee. Clothes and furniture and pictures … houses full of things and people talking in the houses and having meals and pretending, talking and smiling and pretending.
“It’s mother.”
“What on earth do you mean, Sarah?” said Miriam angrily.
“She’s ill. Bennett took her to a specialist. There’s got to be—she’s got to have an operation.”
Miriam drew up the blind with a noisy rattle, smiling at Eve frowning impatiently at the noise. Driving the heavy sash up as far as it would go, she leaned her head against the open frame. The garden did not seem to be there. The tepid night air was like a wall, a black wall. For a moment a splintered red light, like the light that comes from a violent blow on the forehead, flashed along it. Sarah and Eve were talking in strange voices, interrupting each other. It would be a relief to do something, faint or something selfish. But she must hear what they were saying; listen to both the voices cutting through the air of the hot room. Propped weak-limbed against
