§ 16
When Joan left Highmorton she came into the market-place of ideas. She began to read the newspaper. She ceased to be a leggy person with a skirt like a kilt and a dark shock of hair not under proper control; instead, she became visibly a young lady, albeit a very young young lady, and suddenly all adult conversation was open to her.
Under the brotherly auspices of Peter she joined the Cambridge University Fabian Society. Peter belonged to it, but he explained that he didn’t approve of it. He was in it for its own good. She also took a place in two suffrage organizations, and subscribed to three suffrage papers. Tel Wymark, who was also in Newton Hall, introduced her to the Club of Strange Faiths, devoted to “the impartial examination of all religious systems.” And she went under proper escort to the First Wednesday in Every Month Teas in Bunny Cuspard’s rooms. Bunny was an ex-collegiate student, he had big, comfortable rooms in Siddermorton Street, and these gatherings of his were designed to be discussions, very memorable discussions of the most advanced type, about this and that. As a matter of fact they consisted in about equal proportions of awkward silences, scornful treatment of current reputations, and Bunny, in a loose, inaccurate way, spilling your tea or handing you edibles. Bunny’s cakes and sandwiches were wonderful; in that respect he was a born hostess. Junior dons and chance visitors to Cambridge would sometimes drift in to Bunny’s intellectual feasts, and here it was that Joan met young Winterbaum again.
Young Winterbaum was rather a surprise. He had got his features together astonishingly since the days of Miss Murgatroyd’s school; he had grown a moustache, much more of a moustache than Peter was to have for years yet, and was altogether remarkably grown up and a man of the world. “Funny lot,” he remarked to Joan when he had sat down beside her. “Why do you come to Cambridge?”
“My people make me come up here,” he explained; “family considerations, duty to the old country, loyalty to the old college, and all that. But I’d rather be painting. It’s the only live thing just now. You up to anything?”
“Ears and eyes and mouth wide open,” said Joan.
“This show isn’t worth it. Do you ever drift towards Chelsea?”
Joan said she went to Hampstead now and then; she stayed sometimes with the Sheldricks, who were in a congested house on Downshire Hill now, and sometimes with Miss Jepson. Henceforth, now that she was no longer under the Highmorton yoke, she hoped to be in London oftener.
“Did you see the Picasso show?” asked Winterbaum.
She had not.
“You missed something,” said young Winterbaum, just like old times. “Picasso, Mancini; these are the gods of my idolatry....”
Bunny Cuspard interrupted clumsily with some specially iced cakes. Joan, accepting a cake, discovered Wilmington talking absent-mindedly to her chaperon and looking Pogroms at Winterbaum. So Joan, pleased rather than excited by this chance evidence of a continuing interest, lifted up a face of bright recognition and smiled and nodded to Wilmington....