Nearing London shivering and exhausted she recalled Sunday morning and the strangeness of it being just as it had promised to be. Happy waking with a clear refreshed brain in a tired drowsy body, like the feeling after a dance; making the next morning part of the dance, your mind full of pictures and thoughts and the evening coming up again and again, one great clear picture in the foreground of your mind. The _evening_ in the room as you sat propped on your pillows drinking the clear pale curiously refreshing tea left by the maid on a little wooden tray by your bedside; its fragrance drew you to sip at once, without adding milk and sugar. It was delicious; it steamed aromatically up your nostrils and went straight to your brain; potent without being bitter. Perhaps it was "China" tea; it must be. The two biscuits on the little plate disappeared rapidly, and she poured in milk and added much sugar to her remaining tea to appease her hunger. The evening stayed during her deliberately perfunctory toilet; she wanted only to be down. It began again unbroken with the first cigarette after breakfast, when a nimble remark thrown out from the excited gravity of her happiness made Mr. Wilson laugh. She was learning how to do it. It stayed on through the day, adding the day to itself in a chain, a morning of talk, a visit to Mr. Wilson's study--the curious glimpses of pinewood from the windows; pinewood looking strange and far-away--there were people in Weybridge to whom those woods were real woods where they walked and perhaps had the thoughts that woods bring; here they were like woods in a picture book; not real, just a curious painted background for Mr. Wilson's talk ... all those books in fifty years' time burnt up by the air; he did not seem to think it an awful idea ... you can do anything with English ... and then the names of authors who had done some of these things with English ... making it sing and dance and march, making it like granite or like film and foam. Other languages were more simple and single in texture; less flexible.... Gazing out at the exciting silent pines--so dark and still, waiting, not knowing about the wonders of English--Miriam recalled her impressions of those of the authors she knew. It was true that those were their effects and the great differences between them. How did he come to know all about it and to put it into words? Did the authors know when they did it? She passionately hoped not. If they did, it was a trick and spoilt books. Rows and rows of "fine" books; nothing but men sitting in studies doing something cleverly, being very important, "men of letters"; and looking out for approbation. If writing meant that, it was not worth doing. English a great flexible language; more than any other in the world. But German was the same? Only the inflections filled the sentences up with bits. English was flexible and beautiful. Funny. Foreigners did not think so. Many English people thought foreign literature the best.