“It was simply heavenly going off—all standing in the hall in evening dress while the servants blew for hansoms. I wore my bridesmaid’s dress with a piece of tulle arranged round the top of the bodice. It was wrong at the back so I had to sit very carefully the whole evening to prevent it going up like a muffler, but never mind; it was heavenly I tell you. We bowled off down through the west-end in three hansoms one behind the other, in the dark. You know the gleam and shine inside a hansom sprinting along a dark empty street where the lamps are few and dim; (see ‘The Organist’s Daughter’) and then came the bright streets all alight and full of dinner and theatre people in evening dress in hansoms and you kept getting wedged in between other hansoms with people talking and laughing all round you; and it took about ten minutes to get from the end of Regent Street across to the other side of Piccadilly where we dined in wicked Rupert Street. Just as the caviare was brought in we heard that the Prince of Wales had won the Derby. Shakespeare is extraordinary. I had no idea Hamlet was so full of quotations.”

Miriam flushed heavily as the last words ran automatically from her pen. The sense of the richly moving picture that had filled her all the morning and now kept her sitting happily under the hot roof at her small dusty table in the full breadth of Saturday afternoon would be gone if she left that sentence. She felt a curious painful shock at the tips of her fingers as she re-read it; a current singing within her was driven back by it.... Mrs. Orly’s face had been all alive and alight when she had leant forward across Mr. Hancock and said the words that had seemed so meaningless and irritating. Perhaps she too had felt something she wanted to express and had lost it at that moment. Certainly both she and Mr. Orly would feel the beauty of Shakespeare. But the words had shattered the spell of Shakespeare and writing them down like that was spoiling the description of the evening, though Harriett would not think so.

But anyhow the letter would not do for Harriett—even if words could be found to express “Shakespeare.” That would not interest Harriett. She would think the effort funny and Miriamish but it would not mean anything to her. She had been to Shakespeare because she adored Ellen Terry and put up with Irving for her sake.... People in London seemed to think that Irving was just as great as Ellen Terry.... Perhaps now Irving would seem different. Perhaps Irving was great.... I will go and hear Irving in Shakespeare ... no money and no theatres except with other people.... The rest of the letter would simply hurt Harriett, because it would seem like a reflection on theatres with her. Theatres with her had had a magic that last night could not touch ... sitting in the front row of the pit, safely in after the long wait, the walls of the theatre going up, softly lit buff and gold, fluted and decorated and bulging with red curtained boxes, the clear view across the empty stalls of the dim height of fringed curtain hanging in long straight folds, the certainty that Harriett shared the sense of the theatre, that for her too when the orchestra began the great motionless curtain shut them in in a life where everything else in the world faded away and was forgotten, the sight of the perfection of happiness on Harriett’s little buff-shadowed face, the sudden running ripple, from side to side, of the igniting footlights ... the smoothly clicking rustle of the withdrawing curtain ... the magic square of the lit scene ... the daily growth of the charm of these things during that week when they had gone to a theatre every night, so that on looking back the being in the theatre with the certainty of the moving changing scenes ahead was clearer than either of the plays they had seen.... She sat staring through the open lattice.... The sound of the violin from the house down the street that had been a half-heard obbligato to her vision of last night came in drearily, filling the space whence the vision had departed, with uneasy questions. She turned to her letter to recapture the impulse with which she had sat down.... If she turned it into a letter to Eve, all the description of the evening would have to be changed; Eve knew all about grandeurs, with the Greens’ large country house and their shooting-boxes and visits to London hotels; the bright glories must go—overwhelming and unexpressed. Why did that make one so sad? Was it because it suggested that one cared more for the gay circumstances than for the thing seen? What was it they had seen? Why had they gone? What was Shakespeare? Her vision returned to her as she brooded on this fresh problem. The whole scene of the theatre was round her once more; she was sitting in the half darkness gazing at the stage. What had it been for her? What was it that came from the stage? Something—real ... to say that drove it away. She looked again and it clustered once more, alive. The gay flood of the streets, the social excitements and embarrassments of the evening were a conflagration; circling about the clear bright kernel of moving lights and figures on the stage. She gazed at the bright stage. Moments came sharply up, grouped figures, spoken words. She held them, her contemplation aglow with the certainty that something was there that set her alight with love, making her whole in the midst of her uncertainty and ignorance. Words and phrases came, a sentence here and there that had suddenly shaped and deepened a scene. Perhaps it was only in seeing Shakespeare acted that one could appreciate him? But it was not the acting. No one could act. They all just missed it. It was all very well for Mag to laugh. They did just miss it.... “Why, my child? In what way?” “They act at the audience, they take their cues too quickly and have their emotions too abruptly; and from outside not inside.” “But if they felt at all, all the time, they would go mad or die.” “No, they would not. But even if they did not feel it, if they looked, it would be enough. They don’t look at the thing they are doing.” It was not the acting. Nor the play. The characters of the story were always tiresome. The ideas, the wonderful quotations if you looked closely at them were everyone’s ideas; things that everybody knew. To read Shakespeare carefully all through would only be to find all the general things somewhere or other. But that did not matter. Being ignorant of him and of history did not matter, as long as you heard him. Poetry! The poetry of Shakespeare...? Primers of literature told one that. It did not explain the charm. Just the sound. Music. Like Beethoven. Bad acting cannot spoil Shakespeare. Bad playing cannot destroy Beethoven. It was the sound of Shakespeare that made the scenes real—that made Winter’s Tale, so long ago and so bewildering, remain in beauty.... “Dear Eve, Shakespeare is a sound ...” She tore up the letter. The next time she wrote to Eve she must remember to say that. The garret was stifling. Away from the brilliant window the room was just as hot; the close thick smell of dust sickened her. She came back to the table, sitting as near as possible to the open. The afternoon had been wasted trying to express her evening and nothing had been expressed. The thought of last night was painful now. She had spoiled it in some way. Her heart beat heavily in the stifling room. Her head ached and her eyes were tired. She was too tired to walk; and there was no money; barely enough for next week’s A.B.C. suppers. There was no comfort. It was May ... in a stuffy dusty room. May. Her face quivered and her head sank upon the hot table.