There was no light in the inner room. Clear glassy dark twilight behind the tall window. She stood there waiting for Richard to come down.
Richard loved all this. He loved beautiful books, beautiful things, beautiful anemone colours, red and purple with the light coming through them, thin silk curtains that let the light through like the thin silky tissues of flowers. He loved the sooty brown London walls, houses standing back to back, the dark flanks of the back wings jutting out, almost meeting across the trenches of the gardens, making the colours in his rooms brilliant as stained glass.
He loved the sound of the street outside, intensifying the quiet of the house.
It was the backs that were so beautiful at night; the long straight ranges of the dark walls, the sudden high dark cliffs and peaks of the walls, hollowed out into long galleries filled with thick, burning light, rows on rows of oblong casements opening into the light. Here and there a tree stood up black in the trenches of the gardens.
The tight strain in her mind loosened and melted in the stream of the pure new light, the pure new darkness, the pure new colours.
Richard came in. They stood together a long time, looking out; they didn’t say a word.
Then, as they turned back to the lighted outer room, “I thought I was to have had Tiedeman’s flat?”
“Well, he’s up another flight of stairs and the rain makes a row on the skylight. It was simpler to take his and give you mine. I want you to have mine.”
II
She turned off the electric light and shut her eyes and lay thinking. The violent motion of the express prolonged itself in a ghostly vibration, rocking the bed. In still space, unshaken by this tremor, she could see the other rooms, the quiet, beautiful rooms.
I wonder how Mamma and Dorsy are getting on. … I’m not going to think about Mamma. It isn’t fair to Richard. I shan’t think about anybody but Richard for this fortnight. One evening of it’s gone already. It might have lasted quite another hour if he hadn’t got up and gone away so suddenly. What a fool I was to let him think I was tired.
There will be thirteen evenings more. Thirteen. You can stretch time out by doing a lot of things in it; doing something different every hour. When you’re with Richard every minute’s different from the last, and he brings you the next all bright and new.
Heaven would be like that. Imagine an eternity of heaven; being with Richard forever and ever. But nobody ever did imagine an eternity of heaven. People only talk about it because they can’t imagine it. What they mean is that if they had one minute of it they would remember that forever and ever.
This is Richard’s life. This is what I’d have taken from him if I’d let him marry me.
I daren’t even think what it would have been like if I’d tried to mix up Mamma and Richard in the same house. … And poor little Mamma in a strange place with nothing about it that she could remember, going up and down in it, trying to get at me, and looking reproachful and disapproving all the time. She’d have to be shut in her own rooms because Richard wouldn’t have her in his. Sitting up waiting to be read aloud to and played halma with when Richard wanted me. Saying the same things over and over again. Sighing.
Richard would go off his head if he heard Mamma sigh.
He wants to be by himself the whole time, “working like blazes.” He likes to feel that the very servants are battened down in the basement so that he doesn’t know they’re there. He couldn’t stand Tiedeman and Peters if they weren’t doing the same thing. Tiedeman working like blazes in the flat above him and Peters working like blazes in the flat below.
Richard slept in this room last night. He will sleep in it again when I’m gone.
She switched the light on to look at it for another second: the privet-white panelled cabin, the small wine-coloured chest of drawers, the small golden-brown wardrobe, shining.
My hat’s in that wardrobe, lying on Richard’s waistcoat, fast asleep.
If Tiedeman’s flat’s up there, that’s Richard walking up and down over my head. … If it rains there’ll be a row on the skylight and he won’t sleep. He isn’t sleeping now.
III
It would be much nicer to walk home through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.
She was glad that they were going to have a quiet evening. After three evenings at the play and Richard ruining himself in hansoms and not sleeping. … After this unbelievable afternoon. All those people, those terribly important people.
It was amusing to go about with Richard and feel important yourself because you were with him. And to see Richard’s ways with them, his nice way of behaving as if he wasn’t important in the least, as if it was you they had made all that fuss about.
To think that the little dried up schoolmasterish man was Professor Lee Ramsden, prowling about outside the group, eager and shy, waiting to be introduced to you, nobody taking the smallest notice of him. The woman who had brought him making soft, sentimental eyes at you through the gaps in the group, and trying to push him in a bit nearer. Then Richard asking you to be kind for one minute to the poor old thing. It hurt you to see him shy and humble and out of it.
And when you thought of his arrogance at Durlingham.
It was the women’s voices that tired you so, and their nervous, snapping eyes.
The best of all was going away from them quietly with Richard into Kensington Gardens.
“Did you like it, Mary?”
“Frightfully. But not half so much as this.”
IV
She was all alone in the front room, stretched out on the
