Miriam looked closely at the photograph with hatred in her eyes. Why not the stone steps and the chair and the sense of sunlight; sunlit air? That would be enough. “You get in the way of the air, you _thing_,” she muttered, and the woman’s helpless unconscious sandalled feet reproached her. Voices were shouting to each other on the upper landing. It was Mrs. Kronen’s photograph, of course. Miriam moved quickly away, ashamed of having stared. But it was too late; she had done a horrid thing again. She saw, as if it were in the room with her, the affair of the taking of the photograph, a cross face coming down from its pose to argue with the photographer, and then flung upwards again, waiting. And she had put or let someone put it, in a frame, at once on a strange drawing-room table. Perhaps her husband had put it there. But if he valued it he would hide and shelter it.... When we meet, she will know I have stared at her photograph. Mrs. Kronen came suddenly in with Mrs. Corrie, talking in a rich deep thick voice that moved, with large intervals, up and down a long scale and yet produced a curious effect of toneless flatness, just as if she were speaking a narrow nasal Cockney. There was a Cockney sound somewhere in her voice. She began at once loudly praising everything in the room, hardly pausing when Miriam was introduced to her, and giving no sign of having seen her. If I were alone with her, thought Miriam, I should want to say “’Ullo, ’ow’s yourself?” and grin. It would be the only thing one could genuinely do. Mrs. Corrie almost giggled at the end of each of Mrs. Kronen’s exclamations, but she was very gay and animated and so was Mr. Corrie when he came in with Mr. Kronen. They all went in to dinner talking and laughing loudly. And they went on laughing and joking and talking loudly against each other through dinner. 12