The news, the great great news, wonderful Sarah away somewhere in the background with her miracle—telling it out to the table of women was a sort of public announcement that life was moving out on to wider levels. They all knew it, pinned there; and how dear and glad they were, for a moment, making it real, acknowledging by their looks how wonderful it was. Sarah, floating above them all, caught up out of the darkness of everyday life. … And then Julia’s eyes—veiled for a moment while she politely stirred and curved her lips to a smile—cutting through it all, seeming to say that nothing was really touched or changed. But when the table had turned to jealousy and resentment and it was time to pretend to hide the shaft of light and cease to listen to the music, Julia, cool and steady, covered everything up and made conversation.
And the thought of Julia was always a disturbance in going to tea with the Brooms. Grace Broom was the only girl in the school for whom she had an active aversion. She put one or two questions about them, “You really like going there?” “You’ll go on seeing them after you leave?” and concluded carelessly “that’s a mystery to me—”
Sitting at tea shut in in the Brooms’ little dining room with the blinds down and the dark red rep curtains drawn and the gaslight and brilliant firelight shining on the brilliantly polished davenport in the window-space and the thick bevelled glass of the satsuma-laden mahogany sideboard, the dim cracked oil-painting of Shakespeare above the mantel-shelf, the dark old landscapes round the little walls, the new picture of Queen Victoria leaning on a stick and supported by Hindu servants, receiving a minister, the solid silver tea-service, the fine heavily edged linen table-cover, the gleaming, various, delicately filled dishes, the great bowl of flowers, the heavy, carven, unmoved, age-long dreaming faces of the three women with their living interested eyes, she would suddenly, in the midst of a deep, calm undisturbing silence become aware of Julia. Julia would not be impressed by the surroundings, the strange silent deeps of the room. She would discover only that she was with people who revered “our Queen” and despised “the working classes.” It would be no satisfaction to her to sit drinking from very exquisite old china, cup after cup of delicious very hot tea, laughing to tears over the story of the curate who knelt insecurely on a high kneeling stool at evening service in a country church and crashing suddenly down in the middle of a long prayer went on quietly intoning from the floor, or the madeira cake that leapt from the cake-dish on an at-home day and rolled under the sofa. She would laugh, but she would look from face to face, privately, and wonder. She would not really like the three rather dignified seated forms with the brilliant, tear-filled eyes, sitting on over tea, telling anecdotes, and tales of long strange illnesses suffered by strange hidden people in quiet houses, weddings, deaths, the stories of families separated for life by quarrels over money, stories of far-off holidays in the country; strange sloping rooms and farmhouse adventures; the cow that walked into the bank in a little country town. … Mrs. Philps’ first vision, as a bride, of the English Lakes, the tone of her voice as she talked about all these things.
The getting together and sitting about and laughing in the little room would never be to her like being in a world that was independent of all the other worlds. She would not want to go again and again and sit, just the four women, at tea, talking. The silent, beautifully kept, experienced old furniture all over the house would not fill her with fear and delight and strength. It would be no satisfaction to her to put on her things in front of the huge plate glass of the enormous double-fronted wardrobe in the spare-room with its old Bruges ware and its faded photographs of the interiors of unknown churches, rows and rows of seats and a faded blur where the altar was, thorn-crowned heads and bold scrolly texts embroidered in crimson and gold silken mounted and oak-framed. And when she went home alone along the quiet, dark, narrow, tree-filled little roadways she would not feel gay and strong and full of personality.
On prize-giving day, Miriam’s last day, Julia seemed to disappear. For the first time since she had come to the school it was as if she were not there. She was neither talking nor watching nor steering anything at all. Again and again during the ceremonies Miriam looked at her sitting or moving about, pale and plain and shabby, one of the crowd of girls.
The curious power of the collected girls, their steady profiles, their movements, their unconcerned security rose and flooded round Miriam as it had done when she first came to the school. But she no longer feared it. It was going on, harsh and unconscious and determined, next term. She was glad of it; the certainty thrilled her; she wanted to convey some of her gladness to Julia, but could not catch her eye.
Her gladness carried her through the most tedious part of the day’s performances, the sitting in a listening concourse, doors open, in the schoolroom, while some ten of the girls went one by one with stricken faces into the little drawing-room and played the piece they had learned during the term.
