“Listen, Miriam. Here is something for you.” She awoke to scan the three busy faces. It had not been her fault that she had failed and dropped away from them. Had it been her fault? The time was drawing to an end. Presently they would separate for good. The occasion would have slipped away. With this overwhelming sense of the uniqueness of occasions, she yet forgot every time, that every occasion was unique, and limited in time, and would not recur.... She sat up briskly to listen. There was still time in hand. They had been ages together. She was at home. She yawned and caught Lintoff’s smiling eye. There was a brightness in this little place; all sorts of things that reflected the light ... metal and varnished wood, upright; flat surfaces; the face of the place; its features certainly sometimes cleansed, perhaps by whistling waiters in the jocund morning, for her. She did not dust ... she could talk and listen, in prepared places, knowing nothing of their preparations.... She belonged to the leisure she had been born in, to the beauty of things. The margins of her time would always be glorious.
“Lintoff says that he understands not at all the speech of these young men who were only now here. I have not listened; but it was of course simply cockney. He declares that one man used repeatedly to the waiter making the bill, one expression, sounding to him like a mixture of Latin and Chinese—Ava-tse. I confess that after all these years it means to me absolutely nothing. Can you recognise it?”
She turned the words over in her mind, but could not translate them until she recalled the group of men and the probable voice. Then she recoiled. Lintoff and Michael did not know the horror they were handling with such light amusement.
“I know,” she said, “it’s appalling; fearful”—even to think the words degraded the whole spectacle of life, set all its objects within reach of the transforming power of unconscious distortion....
“Why fearful? It is just the speech of London. Certainly this tame boor was not swearing?” railed Michael. Lintoff’s smile was now all personal curiosity.
“It’s not Cockney. It’s the worst there is. London Essex. He meant I’ve; had; two; buns or something. Isn’t it perfectly awful?” Again the man appeared horribly before her, his world summarised in speech that must, did bring everything within it to the level of its baseness.
“Is it possible?” said Michael with an amused chuckle. Lintoff was murmuring the phrase that meant for him an excursion into the language of the people. He could not see its terrible menace. The uselessness of opposing it.... Revolutionaries would let all these people out to spread over everything.... But the people themselves would change? But it would be too late to save the language....
“English is being destroyed,” she proclaimed. “There is a relationship between sound and things.... If you heard a Canadian reading Tennyson.... ‘Come into the goiden, Mahd.’ But that’s different. And in parts of America a very beautiful rich free English is going on; more vivid than ours, and taking things in all the time. It is only in England that deformed speech is increasing—is being taught in schools. It shapes these people’s mouths and contracts their throats and makes them hard-eyed.”
“You have no ground whatever for these wild statements.”
“They are not wild; they are tame, when you really think of it.” Lintoff was watching tensely; deploring wasted emotion ... probably.