IX

the old gentleman turning hugely to his further neighbour. Miriam’s eyes followed and met the face of Dr. Hurd ⁠ ⁠… grinning ; his intensest brick-red grin. He had not gone! These were his parents . He needs a holiday too, the dear lad, said the old gentleman laying a hand on his shoulder. Dr. Hurd grinned a rueful disclaimer with his eyes still on Miriam’s and said I shan’t be sorry, his face crinkling with his unexploded hysterically leaping laugh. Mrs. Hurd’s smiling little face flickered with quickly smothered sadness. They had come all the way from Canada to share his triumph and were here smoothing his defeat.⁠ ⁠… Canadian old people. A Canadian woman⁠ ⁠… that circular jaw movement was made by the Canadian vowels. They disturbed a woman’s small mouth more than a man’s. It must affect her thoughts, the held-open mouth; airing them; making them circular , sympathetically balanced, easier to go on from than the more narrowly mouthed English speech.⁠ ⁠… Mr. Gunner, sitting beside your son is a violinist.⁠ ⁠… Ah. We shall hope to hear him. Mr. Gunner, small and shyly smiling, next to him an enormous woman with a large schoolgirl face, fair straight and schoolgirl hair lifted in a flat wave from her broad forehead into an angry peak, angrily eating with quickly moving brawny arms coming out of elbow sleeves with cheap cream lace frilling, reluctantly forced to flop against the brawny arms. Sallow good-looking husband, olive, furious, cocksure, bilious type, clubby and knowing, flat ignorance on the top of his unconscious shiny round black skull, both snatching at scraps of Scott and Sissie and Gunner chaff, trying to smile their way in to hide their fury with each other. Too poor to get further away from each other, accustomed to boarding house life, eating rapidly and looking for more. She had several brothers; a short aristocratic upper lip and shapely scornful nostrils, brothers in the diplomatic service or the army. There was someone this side of the table they recognised as different and were watching; a tall man beyond Mrs. Barrow, a strange fine voice with wandering protesting inflections; speaking out into the world, with practised polished wandering inflections, like a tired pebble worn by the sea, going on and