fled down the steps, out through the shop and away up the hill, with a rousing attack on Gerald as she passed him leaning with Eve over the till. Miriam was welcomed. The fact of her visit was more to Harriett than her lodgers. She collected her belongings and carried them up the steps past a small dark flight of stairs into a dark little room. A small fire was burning in a tiny kitchen range; a candle guttered on the mantelpiece in the draught from the shop; there was no window and the air of the room was close with the combined odours of the things crowded into the small space. She went back into the bright familiar shop. Gerald was leaving; see you tomorrow he called from the door with his smile.
“ Now ; I’ll light the lamp and we’ll be cosy,” said Eve leading the way back into the little room. Miriam waited impatiently for the lamp to make a live centre in the crowded gloom. The little black kitchen fire was intolerable as president of Eve’s leisure. But the dim lamp, standing low on a little table, made the room gloomier and Eve was back in the shop with a customer. Only the dingy little table, a battered tray bearing the remains of a hasty, shabby tea, the fall below it of a faded ugly fringed tablecloth and a patch of threadbare carpet, were clearly visible. … She could not remove her attention from them.
Lying sleepless by Eve’s side late that night, she watched the pictures that crowded the darkness. Her first moments in the little back room were far away. The small dark bedroom was full of the last picture of Eve, in her nightgown, quietly relentless after explaining that she always kept the window shut because plenty of air came in, taking a heavy string of large blue beads out of her top drawer, to put them in readiness with tomorrow’s dress. No; I don’t think that a bit; and if I were a savage, I should hang myself all over with beads and love it. She had spoken with such conviction … Up here, with her things arranged round her as she had had them at home and in her bedroom at the Greens’, she kept her life as it had always been. She was still her unchanged self, but her freedom was giving her the strength to be sure of her opinions. It was as