7
“Of course you do,” giggled Eve quietly, “as much as anybody.”
“Then I’m the most crawling thing on the face of the earth,” thought Miriam, turning silently to the tree-tops looming softly just outside the window; “and the worst of it is I only know it at moments now and again.” The tree-tops serene with some happy secret cast her off, and left her standing with groping crisping fingers unable to lift the misery that pressed upon her heart. “God, what a filthy world! God what a filthy world!” she muttered. “Everyone hemmed and hemmed and hemmed into it.” Harriett came in and stepped up on to the high canopied bed. “Ullo,” she said in general, sitting herself up tailor-fashion in the middle of the bed so that the bright twilight fell full upon her head and the breast and shoulders of her light silk-sleeved dress. Humming shreds of a violin obligato, Eve rustled out layer after layer of paper-swathed garments, to be gathered up by Sarah moving solidly about between the wardrobe and the chest of drawers in her rather heavy boots. There would not be any talk. But silently the room filled and overflowed. Turning at last from her window, Miriam glanced at her sisters and let her thoughts drop into the flowing tide. Harry, sitting there sharp and upright in the fading light, coming in to them with her future life streaming out behind her spreading and shining and rippling, herself the radiant point of that wonderful life, actually there, neatly enthroned amongst them, one of them, drawing them all with her out towards its easy security; Eve, happy with her wardrobe of dainty things, going fearlessly forward to some unseen fate, not troubling about it. Sarah’s strange clean clear channel of wisdom. Where would it lead? It would always drive straight through everything.
All these things meant that the mere simple awfulness of things at home had changed. These three girls she had known so long as fellow-prisoners, and who still bore at moments in their eyes, their movements, the marks of the terrors and uncertainties amongst which they had all grown up, were going on, out into life, scored and scarred, but alive and changeable, able to become quite new. Memories of strange crises and the ageing deadening shifts they had invented to tide them over humiliating situations were here crowded in the room together with them all. But these memories were no longer as they had so often been, the principal thing in the room whenever they were all gathered silently together. If Eve and Harriett had got away from the past and now had happy eyes and mouths.... Sarah’s solid quiet cheerfulness, now grown so large and free that it seemed even when she was stillest to knock your mind about like something in a harlequinade.... Why had they not all known in the past that they would change? Why had they been so oppressed whenever they stopped to think?
Those American girls in “Little Women” and “Good Wives” made fun out of everything. But they had never had to face real horrors and hide them from everybody, mewed up.