You may as well make up your minds to that.” Then the band had broken into their favourite Hungarian dance. Three of them sat blissfully back in their deck chairs, but Miriam remained uncomfortably propped forward, eagerly thinking. The music rushed on, she saw dancers shining before her in wild groups, in the darkness, leaping and shouting, their feet scarcely touching the earth and a wild light darted about them as they shouted and leapt. “Set Mirry up in some sort of business,” quoted her mind from one of Gerald’s recent soliloquies. She knew that she did not want that. But the dancing forms told her of the absurdity of going back without protest to the long aching days of teaching in the little school amongst those dreadful voices which were going, whatever she did for them, to be dreadful all their lives. Nothing she could do would make any difference to them. They did not want her. They were quite happy. Her feelings and thoughts, her way of looking at things, her desire for space and beautiful things and music and quietude would never be their desire. Reverence for things--had she reverence? She felt she must have because she knew they had not; even the old people; only superstition ... North London would always be North London, hard, strong, sneering, money-making, noisy and trammy. Perhaps the difference between the north and the south and her own south-west of London was like the difference between the north and the south of England.... Green’s “History of the English People” ... spinning-jennys began in the Danish north, hard and cold, with later sunsets. In the south was Somersetshire lace. North London meant twenty pounds a year and the need for resignation and determination every day. Eve had thirty-five pounds and a huge garden and new books and music ... a book called “Music and Morals” and interesting people staying in the house. And Eve had not been to Germany and could not talk French. “You are an idiot to go on doing it. It’s wrong. Lazy,” laughed the dancers crowding and flinging all round her. “I ought,” she responded defiantly, “to stay on and make myself into a certificated teacher.” “Certificated?” they screamed wildly sweeping before her in strange lines of light. “If you do you will be like Miss Cramp. Certificates--little conceited papers, and you dead. Certificates would finish you off--Kill--Kill--Kill--_Kill_--_Kill!!_” Bang. The band stopped and Miriam felt the bar of her chair wounding her flesh. The trail of the dancers flickered away across the sea and her brain was busily dictating her letter to Miss Perne: “and therefore I am obliged, however reluctantly, to take this step, as it is absolutely necessary for me to earn a larger salary at once.” CHAPTER IX 1