well-browned meat and gravy appeared before Miriam with Mrs. Bailey's
strong small toil-disfigured hand firmly grasping its edge. She took it
to pass it on. Everything was hurrying on.... That's yorce my child said
Mrs. Bailey. The low murmur was audible round the silent table.
Asserting her independence with a sullen formality Miriam thanked her
and looked about for condiments without raising her eyes to the range of
those other eyes, all taking photographs now that she was forced into
movements. Mrs. Bailey placed a cruet near her plate. Yorce she pondered
getting angrily away into thought. Mrs. Bailey _could_ not know that it
might be said to be more correct than yourz. It was an affectation. She
had picked it up somewhere from one of those people who carefully say
off-ten instead of awfen and it gave her satisfaction to use it, linked
rebukingly up with the complacent motherly patronage of which she had
boasted to the whole table. The first of Emile's dishes appeared over
her left shoulder and she saw as she turned unprepared, raised heads
turned towards her end of the table. She scooped her vegetables quickly
and clumsily out of the dishes. In her awkward movements and her
unprotected raised face she felt, and felt all the observers seeing, the
marks of her disgrace. They saw her looking like Eve nervously helping
herself to vegetables in the horrible stony cold dark restaurant of the
hostel. They saw that she resented Mrs. Bailey's public familiarity and
could do nothing. She tried to look bored and murmured thank you when
she had taken her third vegetable. It sounded out like a proclamation in
the intense silence and she turned angrily to her plate trying to
remember whether she had heard anyone else thank Emile for
vegetables.... After all she was paying for the meal and her
politeness to Emile was her own affair. Abroad people bowed or raised
their hats going in and out of shops and said Monsieur to policemen. Her
efforts to eat abstractedly and to appear plunged in thought made her
feel more and more like a poor relation. The details of her meeting with
Eve kept appearing in and out of her attempt to get back her sense of
Mrs. Bailey's house as a secret warmth and brightness added to the many
resources of her life. Mrs. Bailey knew that her house had been
transformed by the meeting with Eve and was trying to tell her that she
was not as independent as she thought.
What were the exact things she had told Mrs. Bailey? She had talked
excitedly and scrappily and all the time Mrs. Bailey had been gathering
information and drawing her own conclusions about the Hendersons. Mrs.
Bailey saw Eve's arrival at the station and her weary resentment of
having everything done for her in the London manner, her revenge in the
cab, sitting back and making the little abstracted patronising sounds in
response to everything that was said to her, taking no interest, and at
last saying _how_ you run on. She saw something of the hostel....