“After all Frills it’s good form to go,” Gerald said idly. “Go on. Smart people go to show their clothes.”
“Well, we’ve shown ours.”
Harriett flew out of her chair and daintily kicked him.
He grabbed and missed and sank back wailing, his face hidden in a cushion. Her dainty foot flew out once more and he smothered a shriek.
“Shut up,” said Harriett curling herself up in her chair.
Gerald wailed on.
“Do we smoke in here?” said Miriam, wanting the scene to drop or change while it was perfect. She would tell them now about her change of lodgings.
“Yes,” said Harriett absently with an eye on Gerald.
“I’ve changed my diggings,” began Miriam formally, fumbling for her packet of cigarettes. Harriett was hurling a cushion. Gerald crumpled into the depths of his chair and sobbed aloud, beating with his arms.
“Stop it silly,” piped Harriett blushing.
“I’ve changed my diggings,” repeated Miriam uncomfortably. Harriett’s face flashed a response. Gerald’s loud wailings were broken by beseeching cries. Real, absolutely real and satisfying. Miriam answered them from some far deep in herself as if they were her own cries. Harry was embarrassed. Her bright strength was answering. She was ashamed at being seen answering.
Miriam got up conversationally and began looking about for matches in the soft curtained drawing-room light. There were swift movements and Harriett’s voice busily chiding. When she turned Gerald was sitting on the floor at Harriett’s knee beating it gently with his head.
“Got a match, G?” she said seeing in imagination the flare of the match in the soft greenish glare of the room. There was bright light all round the house and a glare of brightness in the garden, beyond the curtains. “Rather,” said Gerald, “dozens.” He sat up and handed out a box. Leaning back against Harriett’s knee he began intoning a little poem of appeal. There was a ring at the front door bell. Miriam got herself to the piano putting cigarettes and matches behind a vase on the mantelshelf. “That’s old Tremayne,” said Gerald cheerfully, shooting his linen and glancing in the strip of mirror in the overmantel. The door opened admitting the light from the hall. The curtains at the open French windows swayed forward flooding the room with the bright garden light. Into the brightness stepped Mr. Tremayne, grey-clad and with a pink rose in his buttonhole.
Over tea they heard the story of his morning and how it had been interrupted by the man on the floor above who had come down in his dressing gown to tell him about a birthday party … the two men sitting telling each other stories about drinks and people seeing each other home. After tea he settled back easily in his chair and went on with his stories. Miriam found it almost impossible to follow him. She grew weary of his bantering tone. It smeared over everything he touched and made him appear to be saying one thing over and over again in innuendo. Something he could not say out and would never get away from. He made little pauses and then it gleamed horribly about all his refinement of dress and bearing and Gerald laughed encouragingly and he went on, making a story that was like a play, that looked like life did when you looked at it, a maddening fussiness about nothing and people getting into states of mind. He went on into a story about business life … people getting the better of each other. It made her feel sick with apprehension. Anybody in business might be ruined any minute unless he could be sure of getting the better of someone else. She had never realised that before. … It pressed on her breathing and made her feel that she had had too much tea. … She hated the exponent sitting there so coolly. It made the cool green-lit afternoon room an island amongst horrors. But it was that to him too … he felt the need of something beyond the everlasting innuendo of social life and the everlasting smartness of business life. She felt it was true that he spent Sunday mornings picking out hymn tunes with one finger and liked “Sabbath music” and remembered the things his mother used to play to him. He wanted a home, something away from business life and away from social life. He saw her as a woman in a home, nicely dressed in a quiet drawing room, lit by softly screened clear fresh garden daylight. … “Business is business.” … “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart—’tis woman’s whole existence.” Tennyson did not know what he was saying when he wrote it in his calm patronising way. Mr. Tremayne would admire it as a “great truth”—thinking it like a man in the way Tennyson thought it. What a hopeless thing a man’s consciousness was. How awful to have nothing but a man’s consciousness. One could test it so easily if one were a little careful, and know exactly how it would behave. …
Opening a volume of Mendelssohn she played from his point of view one of the Songs without Words quietly into the conversation. The room grew still. She felt herself and Mr. Tremayne as duplicates of Harriett and Gerald only that she was a very religious
