The girls did not realise the news at all. They kept going off into questions about details until the fact of Eve’s coming disappeared altogether and only Eve’s point of view and Eve’s courage and her difficulties remained. … One had told it the wrong way. Better not to have given any facts at all but just to have said Eve’s coming to London; isn’t it weird? But then they would have said is she coming to London to see the Queen? The Queen. That would have been true. She was coming to London partly to see the Queen. Perhaps the trouble was that they had been cheated by not being told exactly how Eve was only just managing to come at all and how scraped everything would be. But at least they realised that one had people belonging to one who made up their minds and did definite things, like other people. It was amazing to decide to come to London and be a florist; Napoleon. They realised that and nothing else. She would be able to tell Mr. Hancock on Monday; first him, first thing in the morning and the Orlys during the day.
Mr. Hancock understood at once, making no response at all at first and then standing quietly about near her as she busied herself with her dusting really giving himself to taking in the simple stupendous fact; and really realising it before asking any questions and asking them in a tone that showed he knew what it meant and going on showing all day in his manner that he knew what it was that kept her so brisk about her work. He was divine; he was a divine person. She would never forget being able to say just anyhow, h’m, I’ve got a sister coming to London; and his immediate silent approach across the room, drying his hands. … Of course the Orlys immediately said Oh how nice for you, you won’t be so lonely. What did people mean about loneliness? It was always the people arranged in groups and seeming so lost and isolated and lonely who said that. … Tonight she would begin turning out her room for Eve’s reception. No. It was the Dante lecture. … The day Eve came she would buy some flowers. She understood now why people wanted to put flowers in their rooms when people were coming. She would be a hostess. Some people bought flowers and carried them home when they were alone. … It must be like inviting a guest to keep you company. Like saying you were alone and not liking being alone and putting flowers about to tell you all the time that you did not want to be alone but were. People talked about these things. “I always buy flowers when I am alone.” Like suddenly taking off all their things and showing that they had a crooked body. If they were really miserable about being alone they would be too miserable to buy flowers. If they really wanted the flowers enough to buy them they were already not alone. If they bought the flowers in that fussy excited thoughtless way people seemed to do things they were neither really ever alone or ever really with people … they were in that sort of state that made social life a talkative nothingness sliding about on nothing. …
At the end of the afternoon she wandered forgetfully into the warmth of the empty waiting-room. The house was silent. Her footsteps made no sound along the carpeted hall and were lost in the thick Turkey carpeting of the waiting-room floor. The room was lit only by the firelight. From its wide clear core striped by black bars a broad rose-gold shaft glowed out across the room reaching the copper vessels on the black oak sideboard and the lower part of the long mirror between the windows where the midmost piece of copper gleamed in reflection. She stood still, holding the warm air in her nostrils, everything was blotted out and then restored to its place … what place, why was it good, what was she trying to remember? … In the familiar firelit winter darkness was a faint dry warm scent … mimosa. It was a repetition. … It had been there last year, suddenly; drily fragrant in the winter darkness of the warm room preparing for the light and warmth of the evening. It had seemed then like some wealthy extravagance, bringing a sense of the freedom of wealth to have things out of season, and a keen sudden memory in the dark London room of the unspoken inexpressible beauty of Newlands … its soft-toned softly carpeted and curtained effect, fragrant with clusters of winter flowers, standing complete somewhere in the secret black spaces of her mind. … But now here it was again, just at the same moment, just before the winter darkness began
