The worst was that nothing shone. Nothing reflected light. It suddenly struck her as an odd truth that nothing of Miss Holland’s reflected light. Even the domed wooden cover of the sewing-machine, which was polished and should have shone, was filmed and dull.
The only suggestion of life in the room would be the backs of the books stacked in piles on the mantelshelf. She found relief for her oppression in the minute gilded titles of some of the books. They gleamed faintly in the gloom, minute threads of gold.
Well, here it was, the lovely little sitting-room. …
She moved about in it, still unable quite to exorcise the idea that it would change. With eyes cast down, she made her way from part to part, imagined varnish on the floor. Flowers set about. People, hiding the chairs. It would be pain to bring friends in. Cruelty to ask anyone to endure the room for an hour.
There would be no tea-parties.
When her attention returned, Miss Holland’s dead belongings had changed a little. They were forgotten and familiar. Here, after all, was a room and a window, and the things were sufficient. Unobtrusive, like dowdy clothes. She remembered how, between-whiles, she loved dowdiness. How her heart went forth with mysterious desire to thoroughly dowdy, flat-haired women. Women who had no style but their set of beliefs.
Something of this kind must have drawn her to Miss Holland, even while she saw her only as a possible sharer of expenses. …
Miss Holland had been brought by her star. She was moving about on the upstair landing in her heavy, light-footed way, busy and intent. She coughed. Her cough had exactly the sound of her voice.
Would it be possible to go through life in the state of permanent protest expressed by that eloquent cough? For a day perhaps. But a night’s sleep plays strange tricks.
Yet the shock of the furniture had confirmed her sense that something was being offered. Low-toned, apparently gloomy, yet having a strange fascination, a quality. If she put forth no resistance it might be the most exciting, revealing, adventure she had yet had. It was an offer; an offer of the chance of becoming a postulant châtelaine.
“But you make tea with a charm! This is Nectar!”
Miriam stood with the teapot in her hand, looking forward to everlasting Sundays of making tea for Miss Holland and charming her with conversation. They had talked all the afternoon without weariness. The day stretched back long and eventful, full of talk and laughter, to the far-off episode of the morning. Filled with memories, the rooms had grown dear. And the evening lay ahead, secure, if they chose to remain shut up here together. Then a week apart. No evenings. Miss Holland coming home late and tired. There would be only the weekends for the continuation of their talk.
“The fiancée came to tea yesterday,” she said, unawares and stopped. Miss Holland, surely, must be weary of her stories. “I must stop,” she said, “finish my tea and absolutely, really unpack.”
“By no means, mademoiselle, having uttered the fascinating word, you must continue.”
Forcing back a smile, Miriam went on with her story. Marvelling at a world that had left this woman to loneliness. Lonely as she was, she scanned life unenviously, placed herself at once sympathetically within the experience of anyone presented to her. It was as if she herself had had vast experience. Yet in her life there were only those two parts; the vicarage home until she was thirty-five and then the life in London. She had brought with her all the old-fashioned ideas, and yet, without being a socialist, had a forward-going mind, a surer certainty of social transformation than was to be found amongst the Lycurgans.
“I told her I hoped she knew she was marrying the best man in the world.”
“Delightful. You made her very happy.”
“Although extremely strong-minded and in the midst of a successful career, she is a girl, the English girl in the midst of the divine illusion.”
“Why Divine illusion? So contradictory.”
“Well, illusion because its picture of what life with the beloved will be is mistaken. Divine because it reveals to both the best in themselves and each other, what they really are, without knowing it until then.”
“Y … es,” said Miss Holland, clasping the edge of the table and gazing out through the window. “It is unfortunate that it is so frequently doomed to die and inevitably to change.”
“Never. In women, absolutely never, once it’s there.”
“Ah, in women.”
“She’s an amazing person. Can fall out of a moving cab without being hurt. She said, of course, that she knew. But wanted to hear all about him.”
“You were able to render her a charming service.”
“No. It frightened me for her sake that she wanted to talk about him. Of course, she thought me tongue-tied. I was. But only because feeling that her best realisation was just that moment with me. If we had talked, there would have been a wilderness of detail, and the moment gone without taking its full effect.”
“Yet it is most natural that she should have wished to talk of him.”
“It frightened me. She had a charming white hat.”
Though she went on for a while humouring Miss Holland’s desire for pictures and stories, she now framed her discourse in ready-made phrases, and was interested in seeing the way they made effects such as she herself had often gathered up from heard conversations, and in discovering how they fitted a shape of thought about life and led on automatically to other phrases, little touches that finished them off; till
