up and down the street. The new year changed to a soft moonlit breath stealing through the darkness, brimming over the faces at the doors and windows, touching their brows with fingers of dawn, sending fresh soothing healing fingers in amongst their hair. … Eleven … twelve. … Across the rushing scale of St. Pancras bells came a fearful clangour. Bicycle bells, cab whistles, dinner bells the banging of tea-trays and gongs. … Of course … New Year … it must be a Bloomsbury custom. She had had her share in a Bloomsbury New Year. Rather jolly … rowdy; but jolly in that sort of way. … She could hear the Baileys laughing and talking on their doorstep. A smooth firm foreign voice flung out a shapely little fragment of song. Miriam watched its outline. It repeated itself in her mind with the foreign voice and personality of the singer. She drew back into her room.
Her resolutions kept her at work on Saturday afternoon. A steady morning’s work disposed of the correspondence and the inrush of paid accounts. After lunch she worked in the surgeries until they were ready for Monday morning and made an attack on the mass of clerical work that remained from the old year. She sat working until she grew so cold that she knew if she stayed on in the cold window space she would have the beginning of a cold. Better to go, and have late evenings every day next week, cheered by the protests of the Orlys and ending with warm hours in the den. As she got up and felt the aching of her throat and the harsh hot chill running through her nerves she realised that anyhow she was in for a cold. There was no room to go to to get warm before going out. There seemed to be no warmth anywhere in the world. Torpid and stupid, miserably realising the increasing glow of her nose and the numb clumsiness of her feet she put away the ledgers and got into her outdoor things. She resented the sight of the bound volume of The Dental Cosmos that she had put aside to take home. Her interest in it was useless; as useless as everything else in the freezing world. Sounds of dancing and chanting came up the basement stairs. When their work was done they could laugh and sing in a warm room.