8 She pulled up sharply in front of a window. The pavement round it was clear, allowing her to stand rooted where she had been walking, in the middle of the pavement, in the midst of the tide flowing from the clear window, a soft fresh tide of sunlit colours ... clear green glass shelves laden with shapes of fluted glass, glinting transparencies of mauve and amber and green, rose-pearl and milky blue, welded to a flowing tide, freshening and flowing through her blood, a sea rising and falling with her breathing. 9 The edge had gone from the keenness of the light. The street was a happy, sunny, simple street--small. She was vast. She could gather up the buildings in her arms and push them away, clearing the sky ... a strange darkling and she would sleep. She felt drowsy, a drowsiness in her brain and limbs and great strength, and hunger. A clock told her she had been away from Brook Street ten minutes. Twenty minutes to spare. What should she do with her strength? Talk to someone or write ... Bob; where was Bob? Somewhere in the West End. She would write from the West End a note to him in the West End. 10 There were no cheap shops in Regent Street. She looked about. Across the way a little side street showing a small newspaper shop offered help. 11 Thoroughly frightened she hurried with clenched hands down the little mean street ready to give up her scheme at the first sight of an unfriendly eye. “We went through those _awful_ side streets off the West End; I was _terrified_; I didn’t know _where_ he was driving us,” Mrs. Poole had said about a cabman driving to the theatre ... and her face as she sat in her thick pink dress by the dining-room fire had been cunning and mean and full of terror. A small shop appeared close at hand, there were newspaper posters propped outside it and its window was full of fly-blown pipes, toilet requisites, stationery and odd-looking books. “Letters may be left here,” said a dirty square of cardboard in the corner of the window. “That’s all right,” thought Miriam, “it’s a sort of agency.” She plunged into the gloomy interior. “_Yes!_” shouted a tall stout man with a red coarse face coming forward, as if she had asked something that had made him angry. “I want some notepaper, just a little, the smallest quantity you have and an envelope,” said Miriam, quivering and panic-stricken in the hostile atmosphere. The man turned and whisked a small packet off a shelf, throwing it down on the counter before her. “One penny!” bellowed the man as she took it up. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Miriam ingratiatingly putting down twopence. “Do you sell pencils?” The man’s great fingers seemed an endless time wrenching a small metal-sheathed pencil from its card. The street outside would have closed in and swallowed her up forever if she did not quickly get away.