The unconscious, inexorable ship ... gliding across the Atlantic. They would take up their bright Canadian life again. England, a silent picture, fading.... Dear Dr. von Heber. I owe it to myself just to inform you that the legend you heard about me was untrue. Wishing you a happy and prosperous career yours truly. That would be saying I, fool, have discovered too late that I was not clever enough to let you imagine that you were the only kind of man in the world ... discreet women are sly. To get on in the world it is necessary to be sly. Von Heber is sly. Careful and prudent and sly. What did genius Wayneflete think? Genius understands everything. Discreet proper clever women are open books to him. He will never marry. Whimsical old failure, Winchester, disappearing into British Columbia; failure; decorated in his evening conversations by having been to England.... My dear von Heber, what the devil do you mean? When will you meet me? Choose your own weapons ... that would be admitting not having the right to be as free and indiscreet as one chooses ... “a woman must march with her regiment; if she is wise she does”; something like that. If a woman is sly she marches with her regiment ... all in agreement, being sly and discreet, helping each other. What for? What was the plot for? ... there’s a word ... coercion, that’s the word. Better any sort of free life.
If he could have seen. But then he would have seen those other moments too. Von Heber. Power and success. Never any moments like that. Divided life all the time always. So much for his profession, so much for her, outside it with the regiment of women. Proper men can’t bring the wild, gleaming ... channel of flowers, pulling dragging to fling yourself headlong down it and awake, dead. Dead if you do. Dead if you don’t. Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost.
3
“You’re just in time.” They had come back? He had come back for something?
“There’s a surprise waiting for you upstairs”; what surprise Mrs. Bailey; how can you be happy and mysterious; cajoling to rush on into nothing, sweeping on, talking; “a friend of yorse; Dr. Winchester’s room; she’s longing to see you.”
“Good heavens.”
Miriam fled upstairs and tapped at the door of the room below her own. A smooth fluting thoughtful voice answered tranquilly from within the spaces of the room behind the closed door. There was no one with a voice like that to speak to intimately. It was a stranger, someone she had met somewhere and given the address to; a superior worldly person serenely answering the knock of a housemaid. She went in. Tall figure, tall skirt and blouse standing at the dressing-table. The grime-screened saffron light fell on white hands pinning a skein of bright gold hair round the back of a small head. How do you do, Miriam announced, coming forward with obedient reluctance. The figure turned; a bent flushed face laughed from tumbled hair.
“’Ere I am dear; turned up like a bad penny. I’ll shake ’ands in a minute.” With compressed lips and bent frowning brow Miss Dear went on busily pinning. “Bother my silly hair,” she went on with deepening flush, “I shall be able to talk to you in a minute.”
Miriam clutched at the amazed resentment that flamed from her up and down the sudden calm unconscious facade reared between her and the demolished house, spread across the very room that had held the key to its destruction. She fought for annihilating words, but her voice had spoken ahead of her.
“Eleanor!”