The patient sat up with a groan of relief. His dark strong positive liverish profile turned away towards the spittoon. There was a clean broad gap of neck between the strong inturned ending of his hair and the narrow strip of firm heavily glazed blue white collar fitting perfectly into the collar of the well-cut grey coat clothing the firm bulk of his body. “To my mind there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do thoroughly well” he said into the spittoon. “All the hospitals would employ ’em in the end. They’re more natty and conscientious than men and there’s nothing in the work they can’t manage.”

“No, I think that’s so.”

Miriam cleared her throat emphatically. They had no right to talk in that calm disposing way in the presence of a woman. Mr. Hancock felt that too. That kind of man was always nice to women. Strong and cheerful and helping them; but with his mind full of quotations and generalisations. He would bring them out anywhere. It would never occur to him that the statement of them could be offensive. His newspaper office would be full of little girls. “It’s those little ph’girls.” But the Amalgam Company probably had quite uneducated girls. Nobody ought to be asked to spend their lives calculating decimal quantities. The men who lived on these things had their drudgery done for them. They did it themselves first. Yes, but then it meant their future. A woman clerk never becomes a partner. There was no hope for women in business. That man’s wife would be wealthy and screened and looked after all her days; he working. He would live as long as she—a little old slender nut-brown man.

“What was the employment Mr. Dolland was speaking of?”

“Dispensing. I think he’s quite right. And it’s not at all badly paid.”

“It ought not to be. Think of the responsibility and anxiety.”

“It’s a jolly stiff exam too.”

“I like the calm way he talks, as if it were his business to decide what is suitable.”

Mr. Hancock laughed. “He’s a very influential man, you know,” he said going to the tube. “Yes?—Oh, show them up.”

Miriam detected the note that meant a trial ahead and went about her clearing with quiet swift busy sympathy. But Mr. Dolland had been a good introduction to the trying hour. Her thoughts followed his unconsciousness down to his cab. She saw the spatted boot on the footplate, the neat strong swing of the body, the dip of the hansom, the darkling face sitting inside under the shiny hat ... the room had become dreadful; empty and silent; pressed full with a dreadful atmosphere; those women from Rochester—but they always sat still. These people were making little faint fussings of movement, like the creakings of clothes in church and the same silent hostile feeling; people being obliged to be with people. There were two or three besides the figure in the chair. Mr. Hancock had got to work with silent assiduity. His face when he turned to the cabinet was disordered, separate from the room and from his work; a most curious expression. He turned again, busily. It was something in the mouth, resentful, and a bad-tempered look in the eyes; a look of discomposed youth. Of course. The aunt and cousins. Had she cut them, standing with her back to the room, or they her? She moved sideways with her bundle of cleaned instruments to the cabinet putting them all on the flap and beginning to open drawers, standing at his elbow as he stood turned away from the chair mixing a paste.

“You might leave those there for the present” he murmured. She turned and went down the room between the unoccupied seated figures, keeping herself alert to respond to a greeting. They sat vacant and still. Ladies in church. Acrimonious. Querulously dressed in pretty materials and colours that would only keep fresh in the country. She went to the door lingeringly. It was so familiar. There had been all that at Babington. It was that that was in these figures straggling home from school, in pretty successful clothes, walking along the middle of the sunlit road ... May-bell deah ... not balancing along the row of drain pipes nor pulling streaks of Berkshire goody through their lips. This was their next stage. When she reached the stairs she felt herself wrapped in their scorn. It was true; there was something impregnable about them. They sat inside a little fortress, letting in only certain people. But they did not know she could see everything inside the fortress, hear all their thoughts much more clearly than the things they said. To them she was a closed book. They did not want to open it. But if they had wanted to they could not have read.

2

The insolence of it. Her social position had been identical with theirs and his. Her early circumstances a good deal more ambitious and generous.... ‘A moment of my consciousness is wider than any of theirs will be in the whole of their lives.’ ... If she could have stayed in all that, she would have been as far as possible just the same, sometimes ... for certain purposes. A little close group, loyal and quarrelsome for ends that any woman could see through. Fawning and flattering and affectionate to each other and getting half-maddened by the one necessity. The girls would repeat the history of their mother, and get her sour faced pretty delicate refinement. They were so exquisite, now, to look at—the flower-like edges of their faces, unchanging from morning to night; warmth and care and cleanliness and rich clean food; no fatigue or worry or embarrassment, once they had learned how to sit and move and eat. To many men they would appear angels. They would not meet many in the Berkshire valley. But their mother would manoeuvre engagements for them and their men would see them as angels fresh from their mother’s hands; miracles of beauty and purity....

Refined shrews, turning in circles, like moths on pins; brainless, mindless, heartless, the prey of the professions; priests, doctors and lawyers. These two groups kept each other going. There was something hidden in the fact that these women’s men always entered professions.

3

Large portions of the mornings and afternoons of that week were free from visits to the upstairs surgery. From Tuesday morning she kept it well filled with supplies; guessing that she was to be saved further contact with the aunt and cousins; and drew from the stimulus of their comings and goings, the sound of their voices in the hall and on the stairs a fund of energy that filled her unexpected stretches of leisure with unceasing methodical labour. Uninterrupted work on the ledgers awakened her interest in them, the sense that the books were nearly all up to date, the possibility of catching up altogether before the end of the week brought a relief and a sense of mastery that made the June sunshine gay morning after morning as she tramped through it along the Euston Road. Every hour was full of a strange excitement. Wide vistas shone ahead. On the first of September shone a blinding radiance. She would get up that morning in her dusty garret in the heat and dust of London with nothing to do for a month; and ride away, somewhere, ride away through the streets, free, out to the suburbs, like a Sunday morning ride, and then into the country. She had weathered the winter and the strange beginnings and would go away to come back; the rest of the summer till then would go dancing, like a dream. There was all that coming; making her heart leap when she thought of it, unknown Wiltshire—with Leader landscapes for a week and then something else. And meanwhile Wimpole Street. She went about her work borne along unwearied upon a tide that flowed out in glistening sunlit waves over the sunlit shore of the world. The doors and windows of her cool shaded room opened upon a life that spread out before her fanwise towards endless brilliant distances. Moments of fatigue, little obstinate knots and tangles of urgent practical affairs did their utmost to convince her that life was a perpetual conflict, nothing certain and secure but the thwarting and discrediting of the dream-vision; every contact seemed to end in an assurance of her unarmed resourceless state. Pausing now and again to balance her account, to try to find a sanction for her joy, she watched and felt the little stabs of the actual facts as they would be summarised by some disinterested observer, and again and again saw them foiled. Things danced, comically powerless against some unheard piping; motes, funny and beloved, in the sunbeam of her life.... Next week and the coming of the favourite cousins made a bright barrier across the future and a little fence round her labours. Everything must be ordered and straight before then. She must be free and reproachless for the wonders and terrors of their visit.... Perhaps there might be only the one meeting; the evening already arranged might be all the week’s visit would bring. The week would pass unseen by her and everything would be as before. As before; was not that enough, and more than enough?

4

Her rare visits to the surgery were festivals. Free from the usual daily fatigue of constant standing for reiterated clearances and cleansings of small sets of instruments, she swept full of cheerful strength, her mind free for method, her hands steady and deft, upon the accumulations left by long sittings, rapping out her commentary upon his prolonged endurance by emphatic bumpings of basins and utensils; making it unnecessary for him to voice the controlled exasperation that spoke for her from every movement and tone. Once or twice she felt it wavering towards speech and whisked about and bumped things down with extra violence. Once or twice he smiled into her angry face and she feared he was going to speak of them.