“The fiancée came to tea yesterday,” she said, unawares and stopped. Miss Holland, surely, must be weary of her stories. “I must stop,” she said, “finish my tea and absolutely, really unpack.” “By no means, mademoiselle, having uttered the fascinating word, you must continue.” Forcing back a smile, Miriam went on with her story. Marvelling at a world that had left this woman to loneliness. Lonely as she was, she scanned life unenviously, placed herself at once sympathetically within the experience of anyone presented to her. It was as if she herself had had vast experience. Yet in her life there were only those two parts; the vicarage home until she was thirty-five and then the life in London. She had brought with her all the old-fashioned ideas, and yet, without being a socialist, had a forward-going mind, a surer certainty of social transformation than was to be found amongst the Lycurgans. “I told her I hoped she knew she was marrying the best man in the world.” “Delightful. You made her very happy.” “Although extremely strong-minded and in the midst of a successful career, she is a girl, the English girl in the midst of the divine illusion.” “Why Divine _illusion_? So contradictory.” “Well, illusion because its picture of what life with the beloved will be is mistaken. Divine because it reveals to both the best in themselves and each other, what they really _are_, without knowing it until then.” “Y ... es,” said Miss Holland, clasping the edge of the table and gazing out through the window. “It is unfortunate that it is so frequently doomed to die and inevitably to change.” “Never. In women, absolutely never, once it’s there.” “Ah, in _women_.” “She’s an amazing person. Can fall out of a moving cab without being hurt. She said, of course, that she knew. But wanted to hear all about him.” “You were able to render her a charming service.” “No. It frightened me for her sake that she wanted to talk about him. Of course, she thought me tongue-tied. I was. But only because feeling that her best realisation was just that moment with me. If we had talked, there would have been a wilderness of detail, and the moment gone without taking its full effect.” “Yet it is most natural that she should have wished to talk of him.” “It frightened me. She had a charming white hat.” Though she went on for a while humouring Miss Holland’s desire for pictures and stories, she now framed her discourse in ready-made phrases, and was interested in seeing the way they made effects such as she herself had often gathered up from heard conversations, and in discovering how they fitted a shape of thought about life and led on automatically to other phrases, little touches that finished them off; till she began to believe that life was expressible in these forms of thought which yet she knew left everything untouched.