Miss Holland did not know this. Only one here and there seemed to know it. And those one never came across, except in the street suddenly, walking by themselves. But Miss Holland was feeling the result of the silence. The result of their having been, à force de préoccupations, alone in company. Maeterlinck would call them menus préoccupations. But a person standing lighting candles and moving about a room is ... what?
A puff of wind touched the large window, rattling it gently in its frame. Miss Holland muttered to herself.
“I fear that window rattles,” she said at the next sound, but still to herself, a meditative tone.
“Yes,” said Miriam in cheerful conversational voice, and at once felt its irrelevance. She had answered only the tone. In the actual communication there was a fresh source of division. She loved rattling windows; loved, loved them. Anything the wind could do, especially at night. The window was old. It would certainly rattle: perhaps bump and bang. It would be better even than the small squeak, squeak, of the small lattice at Tansley Street. And with each sound she would be aware of Miss Holland, disliking it.
“I can’t abide rattling windows,” said Miss Holland, vindictively.
“I love them.”
“What a strange taste,” said Miss Holland ruefully, and immediately laughed her tinkling laugh. They laughed together, and began moving more briskly, creating a cheerful noise to emphasise small jests. Again and again Miss Holland’s laugh sounded. She was happy and pleased. How embarrassing it would have been, Miriam reflected, if the last stage of the toilet had presented itself without this cover of bright sound. The trial once happily over, was over for good.
She sat on her pillow and slid down carefully into the freshness of the new bed. Its compactness was not disturbed. Her things were all out of sight. The room about her was exactly as it had been when freshly arranged.
“Oh,” she cried, listening to the pleasant bumping of the window as her body relaxed on the unyielding level of the new mattress and the low pillow fitted itself to her neck. “Oh, music that softlier on the spirit lies——”
“I hope you are not alluding to the window,” chuckled Miss Holland.