Miriam was amazed to see him standing there as though nothing had happened. She did not know that she was smiling at him until his face lit up with an answering smile.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
Miriam did not answer and he disappeared into the saal.
She went on downstairs listening to his voice, repeating his words over and over in her mind.
Jimmie was sweeping the basement floor with a duster tied round her hair.
“Hullo, Mother Bunch,” she laughed.
“It is weird, isn’t it? Not a bit the kind I meant to have.”
“The blouse is all right, my dear, but it’s all round your ears and you’ve got all the fulness in the wrong place. There.... Bless the woman, you’ve got no drawstring! And you must pin it at the back! And haven’t you got a proper leather belt?”
20
Minna and Miriam ambled gently along together. Miriam had discarded her little fur pelerine and her double-breasted jacket bulged loosely over the thin fabric of her blouse. She breathed in the leaf-scented air and felt it playing over her breast and neck. She drew deep breaths as they went slowly along under the Waldstrasse lime-trees and looked up again and again at the leaves brilliant opaque green against white plaster with sharp black shadows behind them, or brilliant transparent green on the hard blue sky. She felt that the scent of them must be visible. Every breath she drew was like a long yawning sigh. She felt the easy expansion of her body under her heavy jacket.... “Perhaps I won’t have any more fitted bodices,” she mused and was back for a moment in the stale little sitting-room of the Barnes dressmaker. She remembered deeply breathing in the odour of fabrics and dust and dankness and cracking her newly fitted lining at the pinholes and saying, “It is too tight there”—crack-crack. “I can’t go like that.” ...