The news, the great great news, wonderful Sarah away somewhere in the background with her miracle--telling it out to the table of women was a sort of public announcement that life was moving out on to wider levels. They all knew it, pinned there; and how dear and glad they were, for a moment, making it real, acknowledging by their looks how wonderful it was. Sarah, floating above them all, caught up out of the darkness of everyday life.... And then Julia’s eyes--veiled for a moment while she politely stirred and curved her lips to a smile--cutting through it all, seeming to say that nothing was really touched or changed. But when the table had turned to jealousy and resentment and it was time to pretend to hide the shaft of light and cease to listen to the music, Julia, cool and steady, covered everything up and made conversation. 12 And the thought of Julia was always a disturbance in going to tea with the Brooms. Grace Broom was the only girl in the school for whom she had an active aversion. She put one or two questions about them, ‘You really like going there?’ ‘You’ll go on seeing them after you leave?’ and concluded carelessly ‘that’s a mystery to me----’ Sitting at tea shut in in the Brooms’ little dining-room with the blinds down and the dark red rep curtains drawn and the gas-light and brilliant fire-light shining on the brilliantly polished davenport in the window-space and the thick bevelled glass of the Satsuma-laden mahogany sideboard, the dim cracked oil-painting of Shakespeare above the mantel-shelf, the dark old landscapes round the little walls, the new picture of Queen Victoria leaning on a stick and supported by Hindu servants, receiving a minister, the solid silver tea-service, the fine heavily edged linen table-cover, the gleaming, various, delicately filled dishes, the great bowl of flowers, the heavy, carven, unmoved, age-long dreaming faces of the three women with their living interested eyes, she would suddenly, in the midst of a deep, calm undisturbing silence become aware of Julia. Julia would not be impressed by the surroundings, the strange silent deeps of the room. She would discover only that she was with people who revered “our Queen” and despised “the working classes.” It would be no satisfaction to her to sit drinking from very exquisite old china, cup after cup of delicious very hot tea, laughing to tears over the story of the curate who knelt insecurely on a high kneeling stool at evening service in a country church and crashing suddenly down in the middle of a long prayer went on quietly intoning from the floor, or the madeira cake that leapt from the cake-dish on an at-home day and rolled under the sofa. She would laugh, but she would look from face to face, privately, and wonder. She would not really like the three rather dignified seated forms with the brilliant, tear-filled eyes, sitting on over tea, telling anecdotes, and tales of long strange