Here, coming to a window full of food, she became aware that,
wonderfully, and for the first time for weeks, she was hungry; so hungry
that she didn't want dinner or supper or anything future, but something
now. She went in; and all her gilded visions of the Ritz and the
Thackeray Hôtel were swamped in one huge cup (she felt how legitimate
and appropriate a drink it was for a bishop's daughter without a
chaperon, and ordered the biggest size costing four-pence) of Aerated
Bread Shop cocoa.
It was six o'clock when she emerged, amazingly nourished, from that
strange place where long-backed elderly men with tired eyes were
hurriedly eating poached eggs on chilly little clothless marble tables,
and continued down Regent Street.
She now felt strangely settled in her mind. She no longer wanted to go
to the Ritz. Indeed the notion of dining anywhere with the cocoa
clothing her internally as with a garment--a thick winter garment,
almost she thought like the closer kinds of fur--was revolting. She
still felt enterprising, but a little clogged. She thought now more of
things like fresh air and exercise. Not now for her the heat and glitter
of a music-hall. There was a taste in that pure drink that was
irreconcilable with music-halls, a satisfying property in its
unadulteratedness, its careful cleanliness, that reminded her she was
the daughter of a bishop. Walking away from the Aerated Bread Shop
rather gravely, she remembered that she had a mother on a sofa; an only
sister who was so beautiful that it was touching; and a class of boys,
once unruly and now looking up to her--in fact, that she had a position
to keep up. She was still happy, but happy now in a thoroughly nice way;
and she would probably have gone back in this warmed and solaced
condition to her aunt's house in Bedford Square and an evening with a
book and an early bed if her eye had not been caught by a poster outside
an office sort of place she was passing, a picture of water and
mountains, with written on it in big letters:
A WEEK IN LOVELY LUCERNE
SEVEN DAYS FOR SEVEN GUINEAS
THOSE WHO INTEND TO JOIN NEXT TRIP INQUIRE
WITHIN
Now Ingeborg's maternal grandmother had been a Swede, a creature of
toughness and skill on skis, a young woman, when caught surprisingly by
the washed-out English tourist Ingeborg's grandfather, drenched in frank
reading and thinking and in the smell of the abounding forests and in
wood strawberries and sour cream. She had lived, up to the day when for
some quite undiscoverable reason she allowed herself to be married to
the narrow stranger, in the middle of big beautiful things--big
stretches of water, big mountains, big winds, big lonelinesses; and
Ingeborg, who had never been out of England and had spent years in the
soft and soppy west, seeing the picture of the great lake and the great
sky in the window in Regent Street, felt a quick grip on her heart.
It was the fingers of her grandmother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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