other. If I had turned and faced them then I should have said worse things than I had said to Mr. Hancock. I hated them, with their resources and their serenity, complacently pleased with each other because they had decided to smash an employee who had spoken out to them.”
“This was indeed a scene of remarkable significance.”
“I don’t know. … I once told Mr. Hancock that I would give notice every year, because I think it must be so horrible to dismiss anybody. But I’m not going to be sent away by machinery. In a way it is like a family suddenly going to law.”
But with the passing of the park and the coming of the tall houses on either side of the road, the open June morning was quenched. It retreated to balconies, flower-filled by shocked condemning people, prosperously turned away towards the world from which she was banished. Wimpole Street, Harley Street, Cavendish Square. The names sounded in her ears the appeal they had made when she was helplessly looking for work. It was as if she were still waiting to come. …
Within the Saturday morning peace of the deserted house lingered the relief that had followed their definite decision. They were all drawn together to begin again, renewed, freshly conscious of the stabilities of the practice; their enclosed cooperating relationship. …
She concentrated her mental gaze on their grouped personalities, sharing their long consultations, acting out in her mind with characteristic gesture and speech, the part each one had taken, confronting them one by one, in solitude, with a different version, holding on, breaking into their commonsense finalities. … It was all nothing; meaningless … like things in history that led on to events that did not belong to them because nobody went below the surface of the way things appear to be joined together but are not … but the words