She welcomed the sound of Mrs. Orly’s voice, tired and animated at the front door, and rose gladly as she came into the room with little bright broken incoherent phrases, and the bright deep unwearied dauntless look of welcome in her little tired face. She was swept into the den and kept there for a prolonged tea-time, being questioned in detail about her Christmas in Eve’s shop, seeing Mrs. Orly’s Christmas presents and presently moving in and out of groups of people she knew only by name. An extraordinary number of disasters had happened amongst them. She listened without surprise. Always all the year round these people seemed to live under the shadow of impending troubles. But Mrs. Orly’s dolorous list made Christmas seem to be, for them, a time devoted to the happening of things that crashed down in their midst, dealing out life-long results. Mrs. Orly talked rapidly, satisfied with gestures of sympathy, but Miriam was conscious that her sympathy was not falling where it was demanded. She watched the family centres unmoved, her mind hovering over their imagined houses, looking regretfully at the shattered whole, the views from their windows that belonged to the past and were suddenly strange as when they had first seen them; passing on to their servants and friends and outwards into their social life, following results as far as she could, the principal sufferers impressing her all the time in the likeness of people who suddenly make avoidable disturbances in the midst of a conversation. Driven back, from the vast questioning silence at the end of her outward journey, to the centres of Mrs. Orly’s pictures, she tried to dwell sympathetically with the stricken people and fled aghast before their inexorable circumstances. They were all so hemmed in, so closely grouped that they had no free edges, and were completely, publicly at the mercy of the things that happened. Everyone in social life was aware of this. Experienced people said “there is always _something_,” “a skeleton in every cupboard” ..... But why did people get into cupboards? Something or someone was to blame. In some way that pressed through the picture now in one form and now in another, just eluding expression in any single statement she could frame, these bright-looking lives, free of all that civilisation had to offer, were all to blame; all facing the same way, unaware of anything but the life they lived among themselves, they _made_ the shadow that hung over them all; they invited its sudden descents ...... She felt that her thoughts were cruel; like an unprovoked blow, worthy of instant revenge by some invisible observant third party; but even while in the presence of Mrs. Orly’s sympathy she accused herself of heartlessness and strove to retreat into a kindlier outlook, she was aware, moving within her conviction, of some dim shape of truth that no sympathy could veil.