This interior was the first family interior she had seen since Putney. She was entering it after a period of awful lodging-houses and garish impersonal hotels. It was touchingly beautiful to her. The baby should be born in it, should grow up in it, should know it as the home of memory.... Then it became a vision, a hallucination, and the owning of it became an illusion. How could she own it? Only yesterday Miss Grig had thrown her out of Clifford Street with ten days' wages for a weapon to fight the whole world with. All that had happened since was untrue and hadn't happened.
"I'll go upstairs," she said coldly to the parlour-maid. She had to be cold in order to be dignified. Milly Merrislate used to pose like that sometimes. The resemblance annoyed her, but what could she do in her weakness against the power of the situation? She did as best she might.
On the first floor the parlourmaid, switching lights off and on, said:
"This is the bathroom and so on."
"Yes. That is Miss Grig's room," in a hushed voice.
Lilian murmured no affirmative at the face of the shut door; her eyes had a gleam of cruelty, and involuntarily her hands clenched. The house began to grow enormous, endless.
"This is the principal bedroom." They went into it. Curtains drawn. Two soft lights. A narrowish bed. The dressing-table naked. A wonderful easy-chair. Polished surfaces everywhere. Cunning, mild tints--the whole mysteriously beautiful. Felix! She sank into the easy-chair, drawing off her black gloves. Another maid and the young man were bumping the trunks up the stairs.
"Will you have everything brought in here'm?"
"Please." She asked that two of the trunks should be pushed under the bed; they were Felix's. The other maid and the young man departed.
"Will you take anything'm?"