Upstairs she found herself eagerly tearing open the letter. … “I’ve just heard from an old schoolfellow,” she heard herself saying to the girls in Kennett Street. There was something exciting in the letter … at the end Alma Wilson (officially Mrs. G. Wilson) … strange people in the room … Alma amongst them; looking out from amongst dreadfulness. Married. She had gone in amongst the crowd already—forever. How clever of her … deceitful … that little spark of Alma in her must have been deceitful … sly, at some moment. Alma’s eyes glanced at her with a new more preoccupied and covered look … she used to go sometimes to theatres with large parties of people with money and the usual dresses who never thought anything about anything … perhaps that was part of the reason, perhaps Alma was more that than she had thought … marrying in the sort of way she went to theatre-parties—clever. The letter was full of excitement … Alma leaping up from her marriage and clutching at her … not really married; dancing to some tune in some usual way like all those women and jumping up in a way that fizzled and could not be kept up. …
“You dear old thing! … fell out of the sky this morning … to fill pages with ‘you dear old thing!’ … see you at once! Immediately! … come up to town and meet you … some sequestered teashop … our ancient heads together … tell you all that has happened to me since those days … next Thursday … let you know how really really rejoiced I am … break the very elderly fact that I am married … but that makes no difference. …” That would not be so bad—seeing Alma alone in a tea shop in the west end; in a part of the new life, that would be all right; nothing need happen, nothing would be touched, “all I have had the temerity to do …” what did that mean?
Unpinning the buckram-stiffened black velvet band from her neck, she felt again with a rush of joy that her day was beginning and moved eagerly about amongst the strange angles and shadows of her room, the rich day all about her. Somebody had put up her little varnished oak bookshelf just in the right place, the lower shelf in a line with the little mantelpiece. When the gas bracket was swung out from the wall the naked flame shone on the backs of the indiscriminately arranged books … the calf-bound Shakespeare could be read now comfortably in the immense fresh dark night under the gas flame; the Perne’s memorial edition of Tennyson. … She washed her face and hands in hard cold water at the little rickety washstand, yellow-grained rich beloved, drying them on the thin holey face towel hurriedly. Lying neatly folded amongst the confusion of oddments in a top drawer was her lace tie. Holding it out to its full length she spread it against her neck, crossed the ends at the back bringing them back round her neck to spread in a narrow flat plastron to her waist, kept in place by a brooch at the top and a pin fastened invisibly halfway down. Her face shone fresh and young above the creamy lace … the tie was still fairly new and crisp … when it had to be washed it would be limp … but it would go on some time just for evenings transforming her harsh black John Doble half guinea costume into evening dress. For some moments she contemplated its pleasant continuous pattern and the way the rounded patterned ends fell just below the belt. …
The top-floor bell would not ring. After some hesitation Miriam rang the house bell. The door was opened by a woman in a silk petticoat and a dressing jacket. Miriam gazed dumbly into large clear blue eyes gazing at her from a large clean clear fresh face feathered with little soft natural curls, cut out sharply against the dark passage.
“Are you for the top?” enquired the woman in a smooth serene sleepy voice.
“Yes,” announced Miriam eagerly coming in and closing the door, her ears straining to catch the placid words spoken by the woman as she disappeared softly into a softly-lit room. She went tremulously up the dark stairs into a thick stale odour of rancid fried grease and on towards a light that glimmered from the topmost short flight of steep uncarpeted winding stairs. “They’re in,” said her thoughts with a quick warm leap. “Hullo,” she asserted, ascending the stairs.
“Hullo,” came in response a quick challenging voice … a soft clear reed-like happy ring that Miriam felt to her knees while her happy
