7
... There were girls who let themselves be kissed for fun.... Playing “Kiss in the Ring,” being kissed by someone they did not mean to always be with, all their life ... how sad and dreadful. Why did it not break their hearts?
8
Meg Wedderburn was smiling on her hearthrug, being thanked and praised. Her brown violin hung amongst the folds of her skirt.
“People do like us,” mused Miriam, listening to the peculiar sympathy of the family voice.
Meg was there, away from her own home, happy with them, the front door shut, their garden and house all round her and her strange luggage upstairs in one of the spare rooms. Nice Meg....
9
After breakfast the next morning Miriam sat in a low carpet chair at a window in the long bedroom she shared with Harriett. It was a morning of blazing sunlight and bright blue. She had just come up through the cool house from a rose-gathering tour of the garden with Harriett. A little bunch of pink anemones she had picked for herself were set in a tumbler on the wash-hand-stand.
She had left the door open to hear coming faintly up from the far-away drawing-room the tap-tap of hammering that told her Sarah and Eve were stretching the drugget.
On her knee lay her father’s cigarette-making machine and a parcel of papers and tobacco. An empty cigarette tin stood upon the window-sill.