The song might banish Eve’s self-assertion and bring back something of her old reality. Music, any music, would always make Eve real. Perhaps Elspeth would ask for it. But in the long inactive seconds, things had rushed ahead shattering the sunlit hour. Nothing could make it settle again. Eve had missed it forever. But she had discovered its presence. Its broken vestiges played about her retreat as she turned away to Elspeth; Gerald who alone was unconscious of her discovery, having himself been spellbound without recognising his whereabouts, was inaccessibly filling his pipe. She was far-off now, trying to break her way in by an attack on Elspeth. Miriam watched anxiously, reading the quality of their daily intercourse. Elspeth was responding with little imitative movements, arch smiles and gestures. Miriam writhed. Eve would teach her to see life as people, a few prominent overemphasised people in a fixed world. … But Elspeth soon broke away to trot up and down the hearthrug, and when Gerald caught and held her, asking as he puffed at his pipe above her head a rallying question about the shop, she stood propped looking from face to face, testing voices.
The morning had changed to daytime. … Gerald and Eve made busy needless statements, going over in the form of question and answer the history of the shop, and things that had been obviously already discussed to exhaustion. Across Harriett’s face thoughts about Eve and her venture passed in swift comment on the conversation. Now and again she betrayed her impatience, leaping out into abrupt ironic emendations and presently rose with a gasp, thumping Miriam gently, “Come on, you’ve got to try on that blouse.” The colloquy snapped. Eve turned a flushed face and sat back looking uneasily into vacancy as if for something she had forgotten to say.
“Try it on down here,” said Gerald.
“Don’t be idiotic.”
“It’s all right. We shan’t mind. We won’t look till she’s got it on.”
“If you look then, you will be dazzled by my radiance.” Miriam stood listening in astonishment to the echoes of the phrase, fashioned from nothing upon her lips by something within her, unknown, wildly to be welcomed if its power of using words that left her not merely untouched and unspent, but taut and invigorated, should prove to be reliable. She watched the words go forward outside her with a life of their own, palpable, a golden thread between herself and the world, the first strand of a bright pattern she and Gerald would weave from their separate engrossments whenever their lives should cross. Through Gerald’s bantering acknowledgement she gazed out before her into the future, an endless perspective of blissful unbroken silence, shielded by the gift of speech. … The figure of Eve, sitting averted towards the fire, flung her back. To Eve her words were not silence; but a blow deliberately struck. With a thrill of sadness she recognised the creative power of anger. If she had not been angry with Eve she would have wondered whether Gerald were secretly amused by her continued interest in blouses, and have fallen stupidly dumb before the need of explaining, as her mind now rapidly proceeded to do, cancelling her sally as a base foreign achievement, that her interest was only a passing part of holiday relaxation, to be obliterated tomorrow by the renewal of a life that held everything he thought she was missing, in a way and with a quality new and rich beyond anything he could dream, and contemplating these things, would have silently left him with his judgment confirmed. She had moved before Gerald, safely ensphered in the life of words, and in the same movement was departing now, on the wings of Harriett’s rush, a fiend denying her kindred.
Running upstairs she reflected that if the finished blouse suited her it was upon Eve that it would most powerfully cast its spell. The shoulders had been good. Defects in the other parts could not spoil them, and the squareness of her shoulders was an odd thing for which she was not responsible. Eve only admired them because hers sloped. She would come down again as the gay buffoon Eve used to know, letting the effect of the blouse be incidental, making today today, shaking them all out of the contemplation of circumstances. She would give some of her old speeches and musical sketches, if she could manage to begin when Gerald was not there, and Eve would laugh till she cried. No one would guess that she was buoyed up by her own invisible circumstances, forgotten as she browsed amongst new impressions, and now returning upon her moment by moment with accumulated force. But upstairs, confronted by Harriett in the summerlit seaside sunshine, she found the past half-hour between them, pressing for comment, and they danced silently confronting each other, dancing and dancing till they had said their say.
The visit ended in the stillness that fell upon the empty carriage as the train left the last red-roofed houses behind and slid out into the open country. She swung for an instant over the spread of the town, serene unchanging sunlit grey, and brilliant white, green shuttered and balconied, towards the sea, warm yellow brick, red-roofed, towards the inland green, her visit still ahead of her. But the interiors of Eve’s dark little house and Harriett’s bright one slipped in between her and the pictured town, and the four days’ succession of incidents overtook her in disorder, playing themselves out, backwards and forwards, singly, in clear succession, two or three together, related to each other by some continuity of mood within herself, pell mell, swiftly interchanging, each scene in turn claiming the foremost place; moments stood out dark and overshadowing; the light that
