I

she began her story. Miriam sat back in her chair searching her face and form trying to find and express the secret of her indomitable conviction. Being what she was, why could she not be sufficient to herself? Entrenched in uncertainty she seemed less than herself. Her careful good clothes, so exquisitely kept, the delicate old gold chain, the little pearled cross, the old fine delicate rings, the centuries of shadowy ecclesiasticism in her head and face, the look of waiting, gazing from grey stone framed days upon a jewelled splendour, grew with her uncertainty small and limited. It was unbearable that they should have no meaning⁠ ⁠… Grace was ready to take all she possessed into a world where it would have no meaning; ready to disappear and be changed. She was changed already. She could not get back and there was nothing to go forward to. Miriam dropped her eyes and sat back in her chair. The tide of her own life flowed fresh all about her; the room and the figure at her side made a sharply separated scene, a play watched from a distance, the end visible in the beginning to be read in the shapes and tones and folds of the setting, the intentions and statements nothing but impotent irrelevance, only bearable for the opportunities they offered here and there, involuntarily, for sudden escape into the reality that nothing touched or changed. If only Grace could be forced to see the unchanging reality.⁠ ⁠… Oh Miriam darling, breathed Grace in an even, anxious tone. Miriam suppressed a desire to whistle;⁠—Oh well of course that may make a difference she said hurriedly, checking the thrill in her voice. Far back in the caverns of the fire life moved sunlit. She dropped her eyes and drew away the hand that Grace had clasped. Life danced and sang within her; shreds of song; the sense of the singing of the wind; clear bright light streaming through large houses, quickening on walls and stairways and across wide rooms. Along clear avenues of light radiating from the future, pouring from behind her into the inner channels of her eyes and ears came unknown forms moving in a brilliance, casting a brilliance across the visible past, warming its shadows, bathing its bright levels in sparkling gold. Her free hands lifted themselves until only the tips of her fingers rested on her