“I see,” she said intelligently. The readers on either side were glancing angrily. Miriam guiltily recalled her own anger with people who sat together murmuring and hissing. But it felt so different when you were one of the people. The next time she felt angry in this way she would realise how interested the talkers were, and try to forget them. Still it was wrong. “We must not talk,” she breathed. He glanced about and returned to his shuffling of pages.
“Heere it is!” he exclaimed in a guttural whisper far more distinct than his mutterings; “I shall show you this wonderful passage.”
“Ssh, yes,” murmured Miriam firmly, peering at the indicated phrase. The large warm gloom of the library, with its green-capped pools of happy light, was stricken into desolation as she read. She swung back to her world of English books and glanced for comfort at the forms of Englishmen seated in various attitudes of reading about the far edges of her circle of vision. But the passage was inexorably there; poison dropping from the book into the world; foreign poison,