XIX
It had evidently been a great festival. One of the events of Mr. Hancock’s summer; designed by him for the happiness and enjoyment of his friends and enjoyed by him in labouring to those ends. It was beautiful to look back upon; in every part; the easy journey, the approach to the cottage along the mile of green-feathered river, the well-ordered feast in the large clean cottage; the well-thought out comfort of the cottage bedrooms, the sight of the orchard lit by Chinese lanterns, the lantern-lit boats, the drifting down the river in the soft moonlit air; the candle lit supper table, morning through the cottage windows, upstairs and down, far away from the world, people meeting at breakfast like travellers in a far-off country, pleased to see well known faces … the morning on the green river … the gentleness and kindliness and quiet dignity of everybody, the kindly difficult gently jesting discussion of small personal incidents; the gentle amiable strains; the mild restrained self-effacing watchfulness of the women; the uncompeting mutual admiration of the men; the general gratitude of the group when one or other of the men filled up a space of time with a piece of modestly narrated personal reminiscence. …
Never, never could she belong to that world. It was a perfect little world; enclosed; something one would need to be born and trained into; the experience of it as an outsider was pure pain and misery; admiration, irritation and resentment running abreast in a fever. Welcome and kindliness could do nothing; one’s own straining towards it, nothing; a night of sleepless battering at its closed doors, nothing. There was a secret in it, in spite of its simple seeming exterior; an undesired secret. Something to which one could not give oneself up. Its terms were terms on which one could not live. That girl could live on them, in spite of her strenuous different life in the east-end settlement … in spite of her plain dull dress and red hands. She knew the code; her cheap straw hat waved graciously, her hair ruffled about her head in soft clouds. Why had he never spoken of her uncle’s cottage so near his own? She must be always there. When she appeared in the surgery she seemed to come straight out of the east-end … his respect for workers amongst the poor … his general mild revulsion from philanthropists; but down here she was not a philanthropist … outwardly a girl with blowy hair and a wavy hat, smiling in boats, understanding botany and fishing … inwardly a designing female, her mind lit by her cold intellectual “ethical”—hooooo—the very sound of the word—“ethical Pantheism”; cool and secret and hateful. “Rather a nice little thing”; “pretty green dress”; nice!
XX
Miriam turned swiftly in her chair and looked up. But Mr. Hancock was already at the door. There was only a glimpse of his unknown figure arrested for a moment with its back to her as he pulled the door wide enough to pass through. The door closed crisply behind him and his crisp unhastening footsteps went away out of hearing along the thickly carpeted hall.
“Dear me!” she breathed through firmly held lips, standing up. Her blood was aflame. The thudding of her heart shook the words upon her breath. She was fighting against something more than amazement. She knew that only part of her refused to believe. In a part of her brain illumination leaving the shock already far away in the past, was at work undisturbed, flowing rapidly down into thoughts set neatly in the language of the world. She held them back, occupying herself irrelevantly about the room, catching back desperately at the familiar trains of revery suggested by its objects; cancelling the incident and summoning it again and again without prejudice or afterthought. Each time the shock recurred unchanged, firmly registered, its quality indubitable. She sat down at last to examine it and find her thoughts. Taking a pencil in a trembling hand she began carefully adding a long column of figures. A system of adding that had been recommended to her by the family mathematician now suggested itself for the first time in connection with her own efforts. …
How dare he?
It was deliberate. A brusque casual tone, deliberately put on; a tone he sometimes used to the boys downstairs, or to cabmen. How did he dare to use it to her? It must cease instantly. It was not to be suffered for a moment. Not for a moment could she hold a position which would entitle anyone, particularly any man to speak to her in
