At the end of the lecture she sat hurriedly sorting and re-sorting what she had gleaned; aware that her attention had again and again wandered off with single statements that had appealed to her, longing to communicate with other members of the audience in the hope of filling up the gaps. Perhaps the questions would bring back some of the things she had missed. But no one seemed to have anything to ask. The relaxation of the hearty and prolonged applause, had given way to the sort of silence that falls in a room after vociferous greetings, when the anticipated occasion vanishes and the gathered friends become suddenly unrecognisably small and dense. She looked at the woman at her side and caught a swift responsive glance that shocked her, clear blue and white and remote in limpid freshness though it was, with its chill understanding familiarity. Something had gone irrevocably from the evening and from herself. The strange woman was exactly like somebody … a disguise of somebody. Shattering the silence came a voice from the back of the hall. “If the lecturer thinks, and seems to deprecate the fact, that theology deals with metaphysical problems in an unmetaphysical way, that is, from the point of view of metaphysic, in an unscientific way. …” compared to Dr. McHibbert’s his voice was like the voice of an intoxicated man arguing to himself in a railway carriage. … “may we not say that when metaphysic takes upon itself to criticise the validity of scientific conceptions, it does so, from the point of view of science in an unscientific way?”
This Miriam felt, was terribly unanswerable. But the hushed platform was alive with the standing figure almost before the muffling of the last emphatic word told that the assailant had re-assumed his seat.
“I think I have said,” his face beaming with the repressed radiance of an invading smile, was lifted towards the audience, but the blue eyes modestly addressed the frill of green along the platform edge, “that metaphysic, with respect to some of the conceptions of science, while admitting that they have their uses for practical purposes, denies that they are exactly true. Theology does not deny the problems of metaphysic, but answers them in a way metaphysic cannot accept.”
“In that case Theology” began a rich, reverberating clerical voice. …
“This is veggy boring,” said the woman.
He was going to claim, thought Miriam, noting the evidence of foreign intelligence in her neighbour’s pronunciation, that religion, like metaphysic and science, had a right to its premises and denied that metaphysic was adequate for the study of the ultimate nature of reality, exactly as metaphysic denied that science was adequate.
“Yes, isn’t it,” she murmured, a little late, through the deep caressing thunder of the clerical voice, wondering how far she had admitted her willingness to be at the disposal of anyone who found, in these tremendous onslaughts, nothing but irrelevance.
“If one could peacefully fall asleep until the summing up.”
She spoke out quite clearly, moving so that she was half turned towards Miriam, and completely exposed to her, as she sat with an elbow on the back of her chair and her knees comfortably crossed, in all her slender grey-clad length, still set towards the centre of the platform. Miriam unwillingly searched her curious effect of making in the atmosphere about her, a cold, delicate, blue and white glare. She had seemed, all the evening, a well-dressed presence. But her little oval hat, entirely covered with a much washed piece of cream coloured lace and set back from her forehead at the angle of an old-fashioned flat lace cap, had not been bought at a shop, and the light grey garment so delicate in tone and expression, open at the neck, where creamy lace continued the effect of the hat, was nothing but a cheap rain-cloak. Either she was poor, and triumphing over her poverty with a laborious depressing ingenuity, or she was one of those people who deliberately do everything cheaply. There was something faintly horrible, Miriam felt, about the narrowness of her escape from dowdiness to distinction. … Washable lace was the simplest possible solution of the London hat problem. No untravelled Englishwoman would have thought of it. … Behind the serenity of her smooth white brow, behind her cold wide clearly ringed sea-blue eyes, was the dominant intelligence of it all, the secret of the strange atmosphere, that enveloped her whole effect; so strong and secure that it infected her words and movements with a faint robust delicate levity. In most women the sum of the tangible items would have produced the eye-wearying, eye-estranging pathos of the spectacle of patience fighting a lost battle, supplied so numerously all over London by women who were no longer young; or at least a consciously resigned cheerfulness. But she sat there with the enviable cool clear radiant eyes of a child that is held still and unsmiling by the deep entrancement of its mirth.
The chairman had risen and suddenly quelled the vast voice in the midst of its rising tide of tone, with the reminder that there would be opportunity for discussion a little later. A question rang out, short and sharp, exploding, as if released automatically by the renewal of stillness, so abruptly that Miriam missed its significance. The woman laughed instantly, a little clear tinkling gleeful sound, hesitatingly supported here and there amongst the forward rows of chairs by stirrings and small sounds of amusement. Miriam glowed with shame. It had been a common voice; perhaps some lonely uninstructed man, struggling with problems that were as terrible to him as to anyone; in the end desperately getting round them, by logical somersaults, so funny, that these habitually cultured minds could see only the absurdity. Her heart beat with gratitude
