When she had prepared for Mr. Hancock’s first afternoon patient Miriam sat down at her crowded table in a heavy drowse. No sound came from the house or from the den. The strip of sky above the blank wall opposite her window was an even cold grey. There was nothing to mark the movement of the noisy wind. The room was cold and stuffy. Shivering as she moved, she glanced round at the lamp. It was well trimmed. The yellow flame was at its broadest. The radiator glared. The warmth did not reach her. She was cold to the waist, her feet without feeling on the strip of linoleum; her knees protruding into the window space felt as if they were in cold water. Her arms crept and flushed with cold at every movement, strips of cold wrist disgusted her, showing beyond her skimpy sleeves and leading to the hopelessness of her purplish red hands swollen and clammy with cold. Her hot head and flushed cheeks begged for fresh air. Warm rooms, with carpets and fires; an even, airy warmth. … There were people who could be in this sort of cold and be active, with cool faces and warm hands, even just after lunch. If Mr. Leyton were here he would be briskly entering up the books—perhaps with a red nose; but very brisk. He was finishing Buck off; briskly, not even talking. Mr. Hancock would be working swiftly at well-up-to-date accounts, without making a single mistake. Where had he sat doing all those pages of beautiful spidery bookkeeping? Mr. Orly would be rushing things through. What a drama. He knew it. He knew he had earned his rest by the fire … doing everything, making and building the practice … people waiting outside the surgery with basins for him to rush out and be sick. Her sweet inaccurate help in the fine pointed writing on cheap paper … the two cheap rooms they started in. … The Wreck of the Mary Gloucester … “and never a doctor’s brougham to help the missis unload.” They had been through everything together … it was all there with them now … rushing down the street in the snow without an overcoat to get her the doctor. They were wise and sweet; in life and wise and sweet. They had gone out and would be back for tea. Perhaps they had gone out. Everything was so quiet. Two hours of cold before tea. Putting in order the materials for the gold and tin she propped her elbows on the table and rested her head against her hands and closed her eyes. There was a delicious drowsiness in her head but her back was tired. She rose and wandered through the deserted hall into the empty waiting room. The clear blaze of a coal fire greeted her at the doorway and her cold feet hurried in on to the warm Turkey carpet. The dark oak furniture and the copper bowls and jugs stood in a glow of comfort. From the centre of the great littered table a bowl of daffodils asserted the movement of the winter and pointed forward and away from the winter stillness of the old room. The long faded rich crimson rep curtains obscured half the width of each high window and the London light screened by the high opposing houses fell dimly on the dingy books and periodicals scattered about the table. Miriam stood by the mantelpiece her feet deep in the black sheepskin rug and held out her hands towards the fire. They felt cold again the instant she withdrew them from the blaze. The hall clock gonged softly twice. The legal afternoon had begun. Anyone finding her in here now would think she was idling. She glanced at the deep dark shabby leather armchair near by and imagined the relief that would come to her whole frame, if she could relax into it for five undisturbed minutes. The ringing of the front door bell sent her hurrying back to her room.
The sound of reading came from the den—a word-mouthing word-slurring monotonous drawl—thurrah-thurrah-thurrah; thurrah thurrah … a single beat, on and on, the words looped and forced into it without any discrimination, the voice dropping uniformly at the end of each sentence … thrah. … An Early Victorian voice giving reproachful instruction to a child … a class of board school children reciting. … Perhaps they had changed their minds about going out. … Miriam sat with her hands tucked between her knees musing with her eyes fixed on the thin sheets of tin and gold … extraordinary to read any sort of text like that … but there was something in it, something nice and good … listening carefully you would get most of the words. It would be better to listen to than a person who read with intelligent modulations, as if they had written the thing themselves; like some men read … and irritatingly intelligent women … who knew they were intelligent. But there ought to be clear … enunciation. Not expression—that was like commenting as you read; getting at the person you were reading to … who might not want to comment in the same way. Reading, with expression, really hadn’t any expression. How wonderful—of course. Mrs. Orly’s reading had an expression; a shape. It was exactly like the way they looked at things; exactly; everything was there; all the things they agreed about, and the things he admired in her … things that by this time she knew he admired. … She was conscious of these things … that was the difference between her and her sister, who had exactly the same things but had never been admired … standing side by side exactly alike, the sister like a child—clear with a sharp fresh edge; Mrs. Orly with a different wisdom … softened and warm and blurred … conscious, and always busy distracting your attention, but with clear eyes like a child, too.
Presently the door opened quietly and Mrs. Orly appeared in the doorway. “Miss Hens’n,” she whispered urgently. Miriam turned to meet her flushed face.
