But her contemplation of the desert that must be, from their point of view, the life of a woman obviously poor and apparently isolated, took her for a moment far away, and when she returned the link between them was snapped. Her silence had embarrassed their habit of rapid give and take. Making vague promises, she took leave, rescued by their immediate reversion to the forms of speech set for such occasions, from holding forth upon the subject of the dead level of happiness existing all over the world independent of circumstances. They would have thought her both pious and insane.
All the afternoon they had been in harmony, strolling and standing about together in the snow until there seemed nothing more to say; and after each run there had been something more to say. Till Italy lost all strangeness but its beauty and he had seemed a simpler Michael free from Michael’s certainty that everyone in the world was marching to annihilation. It was the discovery of a shared sense of life at first hand that had made them not fear saying the very small things.
And suddenly there was a wall, dividing. No more communication possible; the mountains grown small and bleak and sad and even now, in being alone upon the promontory there was no peace, in all the wide prospect no beauty.
Why was it so much a matter of life and death, for men as for women? Why did each always gather all its forces for the conflict?
If all he said were a part of the light by which he lived he should have been able to remain calm. But he had not remained calm. He had been first uneasy, then angry, and then sorry for the destruction of their friendship.
“The thing most needed is for men to recognise their illusion, to leave off while there is yet time their newest illusion of life as only process. Leave off trying to fit into their mechanical scheme a being who lives all the time in a world they have never entered. They seem incapable of unthinking the suggestions coming to them from centuries of masculine attempts to represent women only in relation to the world as known to men.”
It was then he was angry.
“How else shall they be represented?”
“They can’t be represented by men. Because by every word they use men and women mean different things.”
Probably Italian women led men by the nose in the old way, the way of letting them imagine themselves the whole creation. And indeed the problem presently will be: how to save men from collapsing under their loss of prestige. Their awakening, when it comes, will make them pitiful. At present they are surrounded out in the world by women who are trying to be as much like them as possible. That will cease when commerce and politics are socialised.
“Art,” “literature,” systems of thought, religions, all the fine products of masculine leisure that are so lightly called “immortal.” Who makes them immortal? A few men in each generation who are in the same attitude of spirit as the creators, and loudly claim them as humanity’s highest spiritual achievement, condoning in those who produce them any failure, any sacrifice of the lives about them to the production of these crumbling monuments. Who has decreed that “works of art” are humanity’s highest achievement?
Daphne, preceded by her hurried voice; followed by her maid carrying a tray. She came swiftly in her manner of a small panting tug, eyes surveying ahead with gaze too wide for detail.
“Put it there; near the lady.”
Hitching herself into a chair, she sighed deeply, but not to attract attention, nor in the manner of a conversational opening. She had, without self-consciousness, the preoccupied air of one who snatches a tiresome necessary meal, grudging the expense of time. All her compact stillness was the stillness of energy momentarily marking time. Her face, distorted by efforts, mouth firmly closed, with a goodly bite of the stout little roll, was busily thinking and talking. Continuous. There was no cessation in her way of being, no dependence, none of the tricks of appeal and demand that make most children so quickly wearisome. Yet she was a baby sitting there; a lonely infant, rotund.
Her face came round, so perfectly impersonal in its gravity that Miriam knew the irrepressible smile with which she met it for an affront, felt herself given up to the child’s judgment, ready to be snubbed.
For a moment the round eyes surveyed her, deep and clear, a summer sea in shadow, and then, with her head a little butted forward in the way she had of holding it during her breathless sentences, she hurriedly swallowed her mouthful and cried:
“You’re nice! I didn’t know!” Condemnation and approval together. Scarcely daring to breathe she waited while the child drew near, shouting for her maid who came grumbling and departed smiling when the tables were drawn side by side.
“That’s-my-beecely-German-nurse-I-hate-her.”
“She talks German with you?”
“She talks. I don’t listen. She has a beecely voice. Vicky Vereker says she can’t helper voice, can’t help being a silly stupid and Evil Eaden didn’t say anything and Vicky said show him how she speaks.”
“And did you?”
“I should have been sick. Evil Eaden’s gone skiing again. Evil Eaden likes Napoleon and Vicky doesn’t; he wouldn’t.”
“Why do you like Napoleon so much?”
“Because I like him because he’s the good dear little big one. Everybody is the big silly small one almost.”
Meditating on Napoleon as a pattern for womanhood, Miriam heard the returned skiers arrive upon the platform and watched the eager calm little face that was still busily talking, for a sign.
“When I’ve done my beecely edjacation, when I go
