“My dearest child!” Mrs. Henderson’s flushed face crimsoned unresistingly. She was shocked and ashamed and half delighted. Miriam gazed boldly, admiring and adoring. She felt she had embarked on her first real flirtation and blessed the impulse that had that morning transferred cigarettes and matches from her handbag to her hanging pocket as a protection against suburban influence and a foretaste of her appointment with Bob. She lit a cigarette with downcast lids and a wicked smile, throwing a triumphant possessive glance at her mother as it drew. The cigarette was divine. It was divine to smoke like this, countenanced and beloved--scandalous and beloved. 29 Miriam ran all the way to the station. The gardens on either side of Gipsy Lane were full of flowering shrubs massed up against laburnum and May trees in flower ... fresh clean colours, pink and lilac and yellow and everywhere new bright fresh green ... May. She flung herself into an empty carriage of the three o’clock Vauxhall and Waterloo train, her eyes filled with the maze of garden freshness and was carried off along the edge of the common, streaming blazing green in the full sunlight, dotted with gorse. Bob would not have to wait at Waterloo.... Further down the line, towards Kew, was the mile of orchards, close on either side of the line, thick with bloom.... Walls and houses began to appear. She took her eyes from the window and the gardens and the common and the imagined orchards passed before her eyes in the dusty enclosure. As she gazed they seemed to pass through her, the freshness of the blossoms backed by fresh greenery was a feeling, cool and fresh in her blood. The growing intensity of this feeling stirred her to movement and consciousness of the dust-filmed carriage, the smell of dust. Still again, the sight of the spring flowing from her eyes, into them, out through them, breathing with her breath, the feeling of spring in the soft beating from head to foot of her blood, was all there was anywhere out to the limits of space. The dusty carriage was a speck in the great fresh tide, and the vision of Eve drifting in the carriage, in the corner, opposite, with pale frightened face, saying the things she had said just now, was no longer terrifying, though each thing she said came clearly, a separate digging blow. ... “Dr. Ryman is giving her bromide ... she can’t sleep without it.” Sleeplessness, insomnia ... she can’t see the spring ... why not; and forget about herself. “It’s nerves. He says we must behave as if there was nothing wrong with her. There _is_ nothing wrong but nerves.”