conformity or nonconformity to abstract systems; yet it was impossible to acknowledge the power of a woman, of any woman she had ever known, without becoming a slave; or to associate with one, except in a time of trouble; but in her deliberate excursion into this little room she was free; all her life lay far away, basking in freedom; spreading out and out, illimitable; each space and part a full cup on which no hand might be laid … that little man was just a curious foreign voice, which would presently rouse her impatience … and just now he had seemed so near. … Was she looking at him with Mrs. Bailey’s eyes? Mrs. Bailey would say, “oh yes, I think he’s a very nice little man.” Beyond his distinction as a well-to-do boarder, he would have, in her eyes, nothing to single him out; she would respect his scholarship, but regarding it as a quality peculiar to certain men; and without the knowledge that it was in part an accident of circumstance. She would see beyond it; she would never be prostrate before it.
But the distant vision of the free life was not Mrs. Bailey’s vision; there was something there she could not be made to understand, and would in any way there were words that tried to express it, certainly not approve. Yet why did it come so strongly here in her room? The sense of it was here, somewhere in their intercourse, but she was unconscious of it. … Miriam plumbed about in the clear centre—where without will or plan or any shapely endeavour in her life, she was yet so strangely accepted and indulged. Mrs. Bailey was glancing back at her from the depths of her abode, her face busy in control of the rills of laughter sparkling in her eyes and keeping, Miriam knew, as she moved, hovering, and saw the fostering light they shed upon the world, perpetual holiday; the reassuring inexhaustible substance of Mrs. Bailey’s being.
“It’s Sissie I worry about,” said Mrs. Bailey. Miriam attended curiously. “She’s like her dear father; keeps herself to herself and goes on; she’s a splendid little woman in the house; but I feel she ought to be doing something more.”