“I said damnation.”
“Oh, it’s all right. What have we got to do with horrid knowing people.”
“Well, they’re there, all the time. You can’t get away from them. They’re all over the place. Either the knowing ones or the simpering ones. It’s all the same in the end.”
Eve quietly began to unpack. “Oh well,” she smiled, “we’re all different when there are men about to when we’re by ourselves. We all make eyes in a way.”
“Eve! What a perfectly beastly thing to say.”
“It isn’t, my dear,” said Eve pensively. “You should see yourself; you do.”
“Sally, do I?”
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.