Glancing round, she brought her eyes quickly back to the bureau, at which the girls were gazing as if afraid to look elsewhere. Joining them near the window, to which presently all three had turned as if in the hope of finding material for comment outside, Miriam remembered Sayce. Sayce would enlighten them. The sight of his chosen dwelling-place would bring them, nearer than anything she might try to say, a vision of her world not as a thing pitiful compared to the world they knew, but as something differently real. “Across the way,” she said lightly, “in rooms exactly matching these, is a poet, a great poet.” She watched Mrs. Philps glance across to the opposite house. “He might have an _office_ there perhaps,” said Mrs. Philps with an expression Miriam had seen on the faces of gentlewomen doing distasteful kitchen jobs, lips held in, the upper lip drawn slightly back showing the teeth. She hurried them off to the club. Out in the street, the three were at once acting upon her in their old way, revealing the power built up in their sheltered lives. How far, with their untaxed strength, they outdid her in swiftness of observation. How well they knew and how warmly they cherished every stock and stone upon the highways of London. They had due knowledge. But it was knowledge enclosed, multiplying only upon itself. Vainly as they carried her along, surrounding her, accustomed to her silence and unresentful, she sought for a clear centre where these old friends and the friends with whom her life was now involved, might meet and understand each other. Philistia. The mental immobility of Philistines. But Philistines within their own world were rich and racy. Their critics in failing to savour the essence of middle-class life, missed the essence of all life whatsoever. They feared the _power_ of the Philistines. Their power of stifling freedom. Freedom for what? Freedom, unless people became samurai, slid down into a pit. Perhaps these clever scornful ones, the moderns and the Lycurgans, were all escaped Philistines? Hearing the life in their voices, she loved them as they were, unchangeable. Through philistinism lay perhaps one of the ways of salvation. No. In the midst of the happiness they brought there was always a lurking shadow. The shadow of incompatibility; of the impossibility of being at once bound and free. The garden breeds a longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden. Is there no way of life where the two can meet? 6