What a difference it made to the sitting here in the club smoking-room, waiting for people to arrive. This might have been shivering loneliness, nervous anticipation of coming guests. Instead, there was calm, easy anticipation and forgetfulness. Yet even now he might be moving forward to some fresh beginning that would set her definitely in the past.
Meanwhile she was launched in a tide flowing brightly to music.... Launched with her own hands still steering the fragile barque ... how to continue the metaphor? ... the bright firelight was intruding another. The launched barque was best, suggesting cool freedom and movement. If it stayed in mind it would serve to shape the letter to be written to-day or to-morrow. To-morrow it must be, with the full evening ahead to be followed by the disappearance of the secret life in the companionship of Miss Holland.
To-morrow at Wimpole Street, where perhaps already another letter would have arrived....
The fragile barque; ships that pass in the Night. In sunlight. There is no night. For those who are alive there is no darkness. Meetings and meetings and meetings, and every time a new setting.
“You are being made. You’ve no idea how you are growing.”
Better to find out for oneself and be grateful. But he must always be instructing.... Yet there was joy apart from him. Joy that had lived so long in secret, flowing out now across the strange world of people and events.
She blessed the club. Its gift at the moment when solitude had departed from her home-life, of a new solitude; strange lives surrounding her without pressure, and sometimes granting these large quiet moments.
The door opened upon Miss Holland....
Miss Holland at an immense distance. And somehow changed; coming in like a visitor. She was dressed, what she called twollettay, and evidently at the height of her social form. Free for the evening and looking in here on her way almost as if she knew how supporting would be her familiar figure, ceremonially transformed, at this moment of first launching out as an evening hostess.
Miriam watched her come largely down the empty room. Ah, hers was splendour, par exemple! How well she bore the high spaciousness. Hers was an effectiveness that made its own terms, in advance.