“Well; we may meet next week, if we are both early; I shall be early.” She rose enlivening her grey cloak with the swift grace of her movements and together they proceeded down the rapidly emptying room.
“My name is Lucie Duclaux.”
The shock of this unexpected advance arrested Miriam’s rapid flight towards the harbour of solitude. She smiled a formal acknowledgment, unable and entirely unwilling to identify herself with a name. Her companion, remaining close in her neighbourhood as they threaded their way amongst talking groups along the corridor, said nothing more, and when they reached the doorway Miriam’s determination to be free, kept her blind and dumb. She was aware of an exclamation about the rain. That was enough. She would not risk a parting intimate enough to suggest another meeting, with anyone who at the sight of rain, belaboured the air and the people about her, with an exclamation that was, however gracious and elegant, a deliberate assault, condemning her moreover of the possession of two voices...... Gathering up her Lucie Duclaux cloak, the woman bowed swiftly and disappeared into the night.
The girls had understood that the evening had been a vital experience. But they had sat far away, seeming to be more than ever enclosed in their attitude of tolerant amusement at her doings; more than ever supporting each other in a manner that told, with regard to herself, of some final unanimous conclusion reached and decision taken, after much discussion, once for all. In the old days they would have thought nothing of her dropping in at eleven o’clock at night, with no reason but that of just dropping in. But now, their armoury of detached expectancy demanded always that she should supply some pretext. To-night, feeling that the pretext was theirs, everyone’s, news too pressing to wait, she had rushed in unprepared, with something of her old certainty of welcome. It was so simple. It must be important to Jan that what Hegel meant was only just beginning to be understood. If Jan’s acceptance of Haeckel made her sad, here was what she wanted; even though McHibbert said that we have no right to believe a theory because we could not be happy unless it were true...... All the same a theory that makes you miserable can’t be altogether true ...... Miserable; not sorry. Everything depends upon the kind of man who sets up the theory ..... Pessimists can find as good reasons as optimists ..... but if the optimist is cheerful because he is healthy and the pessimist gloomy because ... everything is a matter of temperament. Neither of them sees that the fact of there being anything anywhere is more wonderful than any theory about the fact ...... making optimists and pessimists look exactly alike ...... then why was philosophy so fascinating?
“You will lose your colour, my child, and get protuberances on your brow.”
“What then?”
St. Pancras clock struck midnight as she reached home. The house was in darkness. She went noiselessly up the first two flights and forward, welcomed, towards the blue glimmer of street lamps showing through the open drawing-room door. It was long since she had seen the room empty. His absence had restored it to her in its old shadowy character; deep black shadows, and spaces of faint blue light that came in through the lace curtains, painting their patterned mesh on the sheen of the opposite walls. The old familiar presence was there in the hush of the night, dissolving the echoes of the day and promising, if she stayed long enough within it, the emergence of to-morrow, a picture, with long perspectives, seen suddenly in the distance, alone upon a bare wall. She stood still, moving rapidly into the neutral zone between the two days, further and further into the spaces of the darkness, until everything disappeared, and all days were far-off strident irrelevances, for ever unable to come between her and the sound of the stillness and its touch, a cool breath, passing through her unimpeded.
She could not remember whether she had first seen him rise or heard the deep tones coming out of the velvety darkness.
“No, you did not startle me. I’ve been to a lecture,” she said sinking in a sleep-like stupor into a chair drawn up beyond the light of the window, opposite his own, across which there struck a shaft of light falling, now that he was again seated, only on his face. Miriam gazed at him from within the sheltering darkness, fumbling sleepily for the way back to some lucid recovery of the event of her evening.
“Ah. It is a pity I could not be there.” His words broke into the stillness, an immensity of communication, thrown forward through their unrestricted sitting, in the darkness, where, to bridge, before to-morrow, the gap made by his evening’s absence, he had waited for her. She sat silent, her days once more wound closely about her, an endless hospitable chain.