Miriam came to dinner silently raging; invisible, yet compelled to be seen. Reduced to nonentity by his wrongly directed awareness, his everlasting demand for bright fussy intelligence. It was her own fault. The result of having been beguiled by joy into a pretence of conformity. For the rest of the visit she would be roughly herself. To shreds she would tear his twofold vision of women as bright intelligent response or complacently smiling audience. Force him to see the evil in women who made terms with men, the poison there was in the trivial gaiety of those who accepted male definitions of life and the world. Somehow make him aware of the reality that fell, all the time, in the surrounding silence, outside his shapes and classifications. Sunk away into separation, she found herself gliding into communion with surrounding things, shapes gleaming in the twilight, the intense thrilling beauty of the deep, lessening colours.... She passed into association with them, feeling him fade, annihilated, while her eased breathing released the strain of battle. He was spending the seconds of silence that to him were a void, in observation, misinterpretations. The air was full of his momentary patience. She turned smiling and caught his smile halting between amused contemplation of vacuity and despairing sympathy with boredom. He had not heard the shouts of repudiation with which she had plunged down into her silence. He dropped her and let his testing eye, which he knew she followed, rest on Alma. Two vacuities ... watched by empty primitive eyes, savage eyes, under shaggy brows, staring speculatively out through a forest of eyelash. Having thus made his statement and caught Alma's attention he made a little drama of childish appeal, with plaintive brows, pleading for rescue. "Let's have some light. We're almost in darkness," said Alma. "We are, we are," he wailed, and Miriam caught his eyes flashed upon her to collect her acceptance of his judgment. The central light Alma had risen to switch on, flashed up over the silk-clad firm little column of her body winged on either side by the falling drapery of her extended arms, and revealed as she sat down the triangle of pendant-weighted necklace on her white throat, the soft squareness of her face, peaked below by the delicate sharp chin and above by her piled gold hair. The day had gone; quenched in the decoration of the night set there by Alma, like the first scene of a play into whose speech and movement she was, with untroubled impersonal bearing, already steadily launched, conscious of the audience, untroubled by their anticipation. "It's _awful_. The evenings are already getting short," cried Miriam, her voice thrilling in conversation with the outer living spaces beyond the shut-in play. His swiftly flashed glance lingered a moment; incredulous of her mental wandering? In stupefaction that was almost interest, over her persistence, after diagnosis, in anachronism, in utter banality?