But over the whole of the floor, gleaming, without blemish, was the new linoleum. And soon the dividing curtain would hang between her and Miss Holland’s cheerless things. A length of cord hung ready, suspended in a deep loop from the top of the window frame to a hook in the wall above the connecting door, and on the floor beneath the window lay a pile of material.
She cried out at the sight of it, bringing Miss Holland in from the next room.
“Yes,” she said disdainfully, “that is the curtain.”
Though in the course of two meetings Miriam had grown used to Miss Holland’s way of speaking, it was still fruitful of wonder. She wondered now, hearing it unchanged by the informality of the occasion, how it had first come into being. At Wimpole Street it was a familiar tone, common to upper middle-class dowdies of the better sort. Perhaps Henry James used it? In men, it was apt to be fluty; a contraction of the range of the voice to two or three fluty notes. In women it was almost only one note, a little curved, breaking at some point of its passage into distress; solicitous.
She had already discovered the exact amount of constriction of the throat necessary to its production, and felt it draw the muscles of her nose and mouth into an expression of faintly humorous contempt. Heard now, as it were in its dressing-gown, it gave a clue to the mode of being that would automatically produce it; a disdain of life’s external processes, of everything but high ends, any kind of high end, from the honour of England to the dignity of the speaker, that everything in life must be moulded to serve.
Once accepted, it would ban any kind of passionate feeling, even passionate chirpiness. Even mirth would not be allowed to reach beyond a faint amusement. On the whole, so far, she had decided against it, decided that it might even be possible to become a sort of châtelaine without the constricted voice.
But on this occasion the voice showed itself in a new light. Subtly attractive. For behind Miss Holland’s tone was a smile that beamed the more warmly for the frost through which it came. It reached and touched like sunlight. Garden sunlight that had been missing through all the wandering years.
Did all these people emanate from high walled gardens, scorning everything that was outside?
In any case, here she was, indefinitely committed to live at close quarters with a scorn she was not sure of being able to share. Must at least beware at the times, this was one of them, when the châtelaine way of taking life went to her head, of treachery to things that stood outside it. Meanwhile the experience would be charming. And to be a little moulded by it would not be atavism. For Miss Holland was more than the châtelaine. She had broken loose, set herself in adventurous circumstances; a châtelaine facing both ways.
“I saw you did not like the idea of sacking, though I think it might have been made quite pretty, painted artistically, as I am sure you could have done it, with a Grecian key pattern or something of the kind, along the border.”