She would find coolness at the heart of the swelter of London if she could keep a tranquil mind. The coolness at the heart of the central swelter was wonderful life, from moment to moment, pure _life_. To go forward now, from this moment, alive, keeping alive, through the London summer. Even to go away for holidays would be to break up the wonder, to snap the secret clue and lose the secret life.... * * * * * The rosy gold was deepening and spreading. * * * * * Miriam found herself rested as if by sleep. It seemed as if she had been sitting in the stillness for a time that was longer than the whole of the working day. To recover like this every day ... to have at the end of every day a cool _solid_ clear head and rested limbs and the feeling that the strain of work was so far away that it could never return. The tireless sense of morning and new day that came in moving from part to part of her London evenings, and strongest of all at the end of a long evening, going on from a lecture or a theatre to endless leisure, reading, the happy gaslight over her book under the sloping roof, always left her in the morning unwilling to get up, and made the beginning of the day horrible with languor and breakfast a scramble, taken to the accompaniment of guilty listening for the striking of nine o'clock from St. Pancras church, and the angry sense of Mr. Hancock already arriving cool and grey clad at the morning door of Wimpole Street. To-night, going strong and steady to her hot room, sleep would be silvery cool. She would wake early and fresh, and surprise them all at Wimpole Street arriving early and serene after a leisurely breakfast. * * * * * The rosy light shone into far-away scenes with distant friends. They came into her mind rapidly one by one, and stayed grouped in a radiance, sharper and clearer than in experience. She recalled scenes that had left a sting, something still to be answered. She saw where she had failed; her friends saw what she had meant, in some secret unconscious part of them that was turned away from the world; in their thoughts with themselves when they were alone. Her own judgments, sharply poised in memory upon the end of some small incident, reversed themselves, dropped meaningless, returned reinforced, went forward, towards some clearer understanding. Her friends drifted forward, coming too near, as if in competition for some central place. To every claim, she offered her evening sky as a full answer. The many forms remained, grouped, like an audience, confronted by the evening.