“When we’ve dropped those famous hats and rung the bell and run away we’ll go on to Bumpus’s and choose our book,” he said, as if asserting themselves and their errand against the confusion through which they were driving.
“Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures,” thought Miriam, glancing with loathing at the pointed corner of the collar that stuck out across the three firm little folds under the clean-shaven chin.... How funny I am. I suppose I shall get through the afternoon somehow. We shall go to the bookshop and then have tea and then it will be time to go back.
“The cabman is to take the hats into the shop and leave them. Isn’t it extraordinary?”
Bob laughed with a little fling of his head.
“The vagaries of the Fair, dear girl,” he said presently, in a soft blurred tone.
That’s one of his phrases, thought Miriam—that’s old-fashioned politeness; courtliness. Behind it he’s got some sort of mannish thought ... “the unaccountability of women” ... who can understand a woman—she doesn’t even understand herself—thought he’d given up trying to make out. He’s gone through life and got his own impressions; all utterly wrong ... talking about them with an air of wisdom to young men like Gerald ... my dear boy, a woman never knows her own mind. How utterly detestable mannishness is; so mighty and strong and comforting when you have been mewed up with women all your life, and then suddenly, in a second, far away, utterly imbecile and aggravating with a superior self-satisfied smile because a woman says one thing one minute and another the next. Men ought to be horsewhipped, all the grown men, all who have ever had that self-satisfied smile, all, all, horsewhipped until they apologise on their knees.
4
They sat in a curious oak settee, like a high-backed church pew. The waitress had cleared away the tea things and brought cigarettes, large flat Turkish cigarettes. Responding to her companion’s elaborate apologetic petition for permission to smoke it did not occur to Miriam to confess that she herself occasionally smoked. She forgot the fact in the completeness of her contentment. On the square oak table in front of them was a bowl of garden anemones, mauve and scarlet with black centres, flaring richly in the soft light coming through the green-tinted diamond panes of a little low square deep-silled window. On either side of the window short red curtains were drawn back and hung in straight, close folds ... scarlet geraniums ... against the creamy plaster wall. Bowls of flowers stood on other tables placed without crowding or confusion about the room and there was another green window with red curtains near a far-off corner. There were no other customers for the greater part of their time and when the waitress was not in the room it was still; a softly shaded stillness. Bob’s low blurred voice had gone on and on undisturbingly, no questions about her life or her plans, just jokes, about the tea-service and everything they had had, making her laugh. Whenever she laughed, he laughed delightedly. All the time her eyes had wandered from the brilliant anemones across to the soft green window with its scarlet curtains.