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Miriam propped “The Story of Adèle” open against the three Bibles on the dressing-table. It would be wasteful to read it upstairs. It was the only story-book amongst the rows of volumes which filled the shelves in the big schoolroom and would have to last her for tea-time reading the whole term. The “Fleurs de l’Eloquence?” Shiny brown leather covered with little gold buds and tendrils, fresh and new although the parchment pages were yellow with age. The Fleurs were so short ... that curious page signed “Froissart” with long s’s, coming to an end just as the picture of the French court was getting clear and interesting. That other thing, “The Anatomy of Melancholy.” Fascinating. But it would take so much reading, on and on forgetting everything; all the ordinary things, seeing things in some new way, some way that fascinated people for a moment if you tried to talk about it and then made them very angry, made them hate and suspect you. Impossible to take it out and have it on the schoolroom table for tea-time reading. What had made the Pernes begin allowing tea-time reading? Being shy and finding it difficult to keep conversation going with the girls for so long? They never did talk to the girls. Perhaps because they did not see through them and understand them. North London girls. So different from the Fairchild family and the sort of girls they had been accustomed to when they were young. Anyhow, they hardly ever had to talk to them. Not at breakfast or dinner-time when they were all three there; and at tea-time when there was only one of them, there were always the books. How sensible. On Sunday afternoons, coming smiling into the schoolroom, one of them each Sunday—perhaps the others were asleep—reading aloud; the Fairchild family, smooth and good and happy, everyone in the book surrounded with a sort of light, going on and on and on towards heaven, tea-time seeming so nice and mean and ordinary afterwards—or a book about a place in the north of England called Saltcoats, brine, and a vicarage and miners; the people in the book horrible, not lit up, talking about things and being gloomy and not always knowing what to do, never really sure about Heaven like the Fairchild family, black brackish book. The “Fairchild Family” was golden and gleaming.
“The Anatomy of Melancholy” would not be golden like “The Fairchild Family” ... “the cart was now come alongside a wood which was exceedingly shady and beautiful”; “good manners and civility make everybody lovely”; but it would be round and real, not just chilly and moaning like “Saltcoats.” The title would be enough to keep one going at tea-time. Anat—omy of Mel—ancholy, and the look of the close-printed pages and a sentence here and there. The Pernes would not believe she really wanted it there on the table. The girls would stare. When “The Story of Adèle” was finished she would have to find some other book; or borrow one. Nancie Wilkie, sitting at tea with her back to the closed piano facing the great bay of dark green-blinded window, reading “Nicholas Nickleby.” Just the very one of all the Dickens volumes that would be likely to come into her hands. Impossible to borrow it when Nancie had finished with it. Impossible to read a book with such a title. “David Copperfield” was all right; and “The Pickwick Papers.” “Little Dorritt”—“A Tale of Two Cities”—“The Old Curiosity Shop.” There was something suspicious about these, too.