“Don’t be annihilated, old fing. Take an oat.”
“Give me one.”
“I will. I do!”
Alma’s revealed splendour ... lighting and warming the surrounding bleakness. In that moment her amazing gift that would move her so far from me seemed nothing. Herself, everything to me. Alma is a star. Her name should be Stella.... But I had already decided that it would not be him. And that marvellous beginning cannot come again.
“Particularly jolly schoolgirls! You’ll like them. They’re free. They mean to be free. Now they, Miriam, are the new woman.” Posing, exploiting, deliberately uncatlike cats. How could he be taken in? Why were all her poses revealed to me? What brought me on the scene just at those moments? Why that strange little series of events placing me, alone, of the whole large party, innocently there just at that moment, to see the origin of his idea of a jolly smile and how he answers it?
“You looked like a Silenus.”
“That sort of thing always looks foolish from the outside. It was nothing. I beg of you, I entreat you to think no more of it.”
Again the little bell. Clean. A steady little summons. He had not gone downstairs.
He was washing his hands; with an air of communicativeness.
“I’ve a piece of news for you.... I have decided to leave Mr. Orly and set up, elsewhere, on my own account.”