“She’s a fighter,” said Miss Prout roundly, as if she had not spoken.
“Fighting is too mild for Miriam. She crushes. She demolishes. When words fail her,” the lifting, descriptive, outlining laughter coming into the husky voice, filling out its insistence, “she uses her fists. Then she departs; back to London; fires off not so much letters as reinforcements of the prostrating blow.” Kind Hypo. Doing his best for her. Launching her on her holiday with approval; knowing how little was to be expected of her.... Ages already she had been here blissful. Getting every moment more blissful. And this was only the first tea. The four weeks of long days, each day in four long bright separate pieces, spread out ahead, enclosed; a long unbroken magic. Poor Miss Prout with her short week-end.... But she went from country-house to country-house. Certainly. Her garments, even on this languid afternoon, were electric with social life. Then hostesses were a necessary part of her equipment.... She must fear them, like a man. She herself could not be imagined as a hostess. There was no look of strain about her. Only that look of insulated waiting. Boredom if her eyes had been the thing-filled eyes of a man, bored in the intervals between meals and talk and events.
“Yes, but do you?” Lame. But Hypo turned, accepting, not departing afresh to tone up the talk. The ringed, lightning-quick grey eyes glanced again, as when she had arrived, taking in the detail and the whole of her effect, but this time directly messaging approval. The luminous clouded grey, clear ringed, the voice husky and clear, the strange repellent mouth below the scraggly moustache, kept from weakness only by the perpetually hovering disclaiming ironic smile ... fascination that could not be defined; that drove its way through all the evidence against it.... Married, yet always seeming nearer and more sympathetic than other men.... Her cup brimmed over. She saw herself as she had been this morning, in dingy black, pallid, tired to death, hurriedly finishing off at Wimpole Street. And now an accepted harmonious part of this so different scene. But this power of blossoming in response to surroundings was misleading. Beneath it she was utterly weary. Tomorrow she would feel wrecked, longing for silence.
“Any more tea, anybody? More tea, Miriam.” Alma waved the teapot. The little scene gleamed to the sound of her voice, a bright, intense grouping in the green shade, with the earth thrilling beneath and the sky arching down over its completeness.
“Yes,” said Hypo, on his feet. “She’ll have, just one more cup. Let me see,” he went on, from the tea-table, “you liked; the Girl. Yes.... No. The teapot. I accuse you of the teapot.”
“I liked both.” Not true. But the answer to the wrongness of the division.
“Catholic Miriam. That’s quite a feat. Even for you, Miriam, that is, I think ...”
“But she didn’t! She called my teapot messy!”
“It’s true. I do think Dresden china messy. But I mean that it’s possible——” She spoke her argument through his answer, volleyed over his shoulder as he brought back her cup, to a remark from Miss Prout. The next moment he was away in the hammock near Miss Prout’s low chair, throwing cushions out on to the grass, gathering up a sheaf of printed leaves; leaving her classed with the teapot people....
“Buoyed up by tea, Edna,” he chuckled, flinging away the end of a cigarette; propping the pages against his knee. “By the way who is Olga?”