Lying sleepless by Eve’s side late that night, she watched the pictures
that crowded the darkness. Her first moments in the little back room
were far away. The small dark bedroom was full of the last picture of
Eve, in her nightgown, quietly relentless after explaining that she
always kept the window shut because plenty of air came in, taking a
heavy string of large blue beads out of her top drawer, to put them in
readiness with to-morrow’s dress. No; I don’t think that a bit; and if I
_were_ a savage, I should hang myself all over with beads and _love_ it.
She had spoken with such _conviction_...... Up here, with her things
arranged round her as she had had them at home and in her bedroom at the
Greens’, she kept her life as it had always been. She was still her
unchanged self, but her freedom was giving her the strength to be sure
of her opinions. It was as if she had been saying all the evening with
long accumulating preparedness, holding her poise throughout the
interruptions of customers and down into the details of the story of her
adventures, _Yes_ I know your opinions, I have heard them all my life,
and now I’m out in the world myself and can meet everybody as an equal,
and say what I think, without wondering whether it suits my part as the
Greens’ governess. She had got her strength from the things she had
done. It was amazing to think of her summoning courage to break again
with the Greens and borrowing from them to start in business, Mr. Green
‘setting his heart’ on the success of the little shop and meaning to
come down and see how it was getting on. How awful it would be if it did
not get on.... But it was getting on...... How terrifying it must have
been at first not knowing the price of anything in the shop or what to
buy for it ... and then, customers telling her the prices of things and
where they were kept, and travellers being _kind_; respectful and
friendly and ready to go out of their way to do _anything_ .... that was
the other side of Maupassant’s “hourrah pour la petite difference”
commis voyageurs .... and well-to-do people in the neighbourhood rushing
in for some little thing, taken aback to find a lady behind the counter,
and coming again for all sorts of things.... Eve would become like one
of those middle-aged women shopkeepers in books, in the country, with a
kind heart and a sarcastic tongue, seeing through everybody and having
the same manner for the vicar and a ploughman, or a rather nicer manner
for a ploughman. _No._ Eve was still sentimental....