Still talking, Mr. Bowdoin went up the rubbish-strewn steps and opened the dusty blistered door with his latchkey. Miriam followed him into a dark bare passage and down carpetless stairs into a large chilly twilit basement room. Nothing was visible but a long kitchen table lit by a low barred window at the far end of the room. I will light a lamp for you in a moment he murmured in his formal cockney monotone; my friends will be arriving soon and before they come I should like to show you my sketches. Miriam sat down silently. The feeling of the neighbourhood was in the room. A heavy blankness lay over everything. She felt nowhere. It had been difficult to take part in conversation walking along the Farringdon Road. It was strange enough to know that anyone lived in a road almost in the city; and paying a visit there was like stepping out of the world.
With his slow even speech Mr. Bowdoin rebuked her here even more strongly for her outbreak of excited talk and loud laughter about Devonshire. He had not felt that they were walking along, outside London, in blank space, free, and exactly alike in their thoughts. He had not had that moment when they turned into the strange dead road east of Bloomsbury, nowhere, and he had seemed like herself at her side and he ought to have laughed and laughed. His sudden searching look, are you mad or intoxicated, with your sudden Billingsgate manners, had said that Farringdon Road was in the world and that he intended to conduct himself in the usual manner of a gentleman escorting a lady. As he lit a little lamp on the corner of the table she glanced at the back of his hair and imagined him sitting at a typewriter with it in curl-papers, and determined to be at ease. What a jolly room she exclaimed with strained animation as the lamplight wavered up and then sat looking at her hands. It would be cruel to look about the room. She had seen kitchen chairs