VI

That’s yorce my child said Mrs. Bailey. The low murmur was audible round the silent table. Asserting her independence with a sullen formality Miriam thanked her and looked about for condiments without raising her eyes to the range of those other eyes, all taking photographs now that she was forced into movements. Mrs. Bailey placed a cruet near her plate. Yorce she pondered getting angrily away into thought. Mrs. Bailey could not know that it might be said to be more correct than yourz. It was an affectation. She had picked it up somewhere from one of those people who carefully say off-ten instead of awfen and it gave her satisfaction to use it, linked rebukingly up with the complacent motherly patronage of which she had boasted to the whole table. The first of Emile’s dishes appeared over her left shoulder and she saw as she turned unprepared, raised heads turned towards her end of the table. She scooped her vegetables quickly and clumsily out of the dishes. In her awkward movements and her unprotected raised face she felt, and felt all the observers seeing, the marks of her disgrace. They saw her looking like Eve nervously helping herself to vegetables in the horrible stony cold dark restaurant of the hostel. They saw that she resented Mrs. Bailey’s public familiarity and could do nothing. She tried to look bored and murmured thank you when she had taken her third vegetable. It sounded out like a proclamation in the intense silence and she turned angrily to her plate trying to remember whether she had heard anyone else thank Emile for vegetables.⁠ ⁠… After all she was paying for the meal and her politeness to Emile was her own affair. Abroad people bowed or raised their hats going in and out of shops and said Monsieur to policemen. Her efforts to eat abstractedly and to appear plunged in thought made her feel more and more like a poor relation. The details of her meeting with Eve kept appearing in and out of her attempt to get back her sense of Mrs. Bailey’s house as a secret warmth and brightness added to the many resources of her life. Mrs. Bailey knew that her house had been transformed by the meeting with Eve and was trying to tell her that she was not as independent as she thought.