“Well?” said Mr. Shatov. The light was going down. “What is this?” he asked staring up impatiently at the lessening flame. “Ah it is simply stupid.” He hurried away and Miriam heard his voice shouting down to Mrs. Bailey from the staircase as he went, and presently in polite loud-toned remonstrance from the top of the basement stairs. The gas went up, higher than it had been before. It must be eleven. It was not fair to keep the gas going for two people. She must wind up the sitting and send him away.
“What a piece of English stupidity,” he bellowed gently, coming back across the room.
“I suppose she is obliged to do it,” said Miriam feeling incriminated by her failure to resent the proceeding in the past.
“How obliged?”
“She has had an awful time. She was left penniless in Weymouth.”
“That is bad; but it is no cause for stupidity.”
“I know. She doesn’t understand. She managed quite well with lodgers; she will never make boarders pay. It’s no use giving her hints. The house is full of people who don’t pay their bills. There are people here who have paid nothing for eighteen months. She has even lent them money.”
“Is it possible?” he said gravely.
“And the Irish journalist can’t pay. He is a home-ruler.”
“He is a most distinguished-looking man. Ah but she is stupid.”
“She can’t see” said Miriam—he was interested; even in these things. She dropped eagerly down amongst them. The whole evening and all their earlier interchange stood far off, shedding a relieving light over the dismal details and waiting to be resumed, enriched by this sudden excursion—“that when better people come she ought to alter things. It isn’t that she would think it wrong, like the doctor who felt guilty when he bought a carriage to make people believe he had patients, though of course speculation is wrong”—she felt herself moving swiftly along, her best memories with her in the cheerful ring of her voice, their quality discernible by him, a kind of reply to all he had told her—“because she believes in keeping up appearances; but she doesn’t know how to make people comfortable.” She was creating a wrong impression but with the right voice. Without Miss Scott’s suggestions, the discomforts would never have occurred to her.
“Ah she is stupid. That is the whole thing.” He sat forward stretching and contracting his hands till the muscles cracked; his eyes, flashing their unconcerned contemptuous judgment, were all at once the brilliant misty eyes of a child about to be quenched by sudden sleep.
“No,” she said resentfully, “she wants good people, and when they come she has to make all she can out of them. If they stayed she would be able to afford to do things better. Of course they don’t come back or recommend her; and the house is always half empty. Her best plan would be to fill it with students at a fixed low figure.” Miss Scott again … his attention was wandering … “The dead flowers,” he was back again, “in dirty water in a cracked vase; Sissie rushing out, while breakfast is kept waiting, to buy just enough butter for one meal.”
“Really?” he giggled.
“She has been most awfully good to me.”
“Why not?” he chuckled.
“Do you think you will go and see your Polish friend tomorrow?” She watched anxiously.
“Yes,” he conceded blinking sleepily at the end of a long yawn. “I shall perhaps go.”
“He might be driven to desperation,” she muttered. Her accomplished evening was trembling in the balance. Its hours had frittered away the horrible stranger’s chance.
“Ah no,” said Mr. Shatov with a little laugh of sincere amusement, “Veslovski will not do foolish things.” She rose to her feet on the tide of her relief, meeting, as she garnered all the hours of her long day and turned with an out-spreading sheaf of questions towards the expanses of evening leisure so safely at her disposal in the oncrowding tomorrows, the rebuke of the brilliantly burning midnight gas.
“But tell me; how has Mrs. Bailey been so good?” He sat conversationally forward as if it were the beginning of the evening.
“Oh well.” She sought about distastefully amongst the phrases she had collected in descriptions given to her friends, conveying nothing. Mr. Shatov knowing the framework, would see the detail alive and enhance her own sense of it. She glanced over the picture. Any single selection would be misleading. There was enough material for days of conversation. He was waiting eagerly, not impatient after all of personal experiences. Yet nothing could be told. …
“You see she lets me be amphibious.” Her voice smote her. Mrs. Bailey’s kindliness was in the room. She was squandering Mrs. Bailey’s gas in an effort that was swiftly transforming itself under the influence of her desire to present an adequate picture of her own separate life. His quickening interest drove her on. She turned her eyes from the gas and stared at the carpet, her picture broken up and vanishing before the pathos of its threadbare faded patterns.
“I’m neither a lodger nor a boarder,” she recited hurriedly. “I have all the advantages of a boarder; the use of the whole house. I’ve had this room and the piano to myself for years, on Sunday mornings until dinner time, and when there are interesting people I can go down to dinner. I do for weeks on end sometimes, and it is so convenient
