Miss Mole by E.H. Young — Read

Hannah had the homeless and the childless person's dislike for Christmas. There were a few people from whom, in the course of her career, she had not been completely severed, and to these she wrote, but the paucity of her acquaintances and her lack of real intimacy with them were very present to her at this time of the year and almost persuaded her of some failure in herself, but it was not easy, and Robert Corder had lately emphasised the fact, to make friends outside the house in which she was a dependent, and to most of the people she had served, often wholeheartedly, sometimes with misguided zeal, becoming absorbed in their affairs as though they were her own, she remained as mere Miss Mole, whose importance vanished with her useful presence. She was accustomed to this state of things but it still amazed her. A human being, to her, was a continuous wonder, a group of human beings made a drama of which she was half creator, half spectator, and she was baffled to know how people amused themselves without this entertainment which never palled and never ended. Hannah was not one of those who considered it a waste of time to lose a train and have to wait on a station platform, who shut their eyes, or read a paper, in railway carriages: she was thrilled by the sight of strangers and by the emanation of their personalities, and it was hard to understand that they did not get the same excitement from her neighbourhood.

When she considered the Corder family dispassionately, she could see that the material for her drama was not promising. The egoism of the Reverend Robert offered the most scope, for the egoism of a person whose abilities are mediocre must have a humorous element, but in Ethel, in Ruth, in the quiet Howard, in Captain Jim Erley, in his shirtsleeves, as he busied himself about the gas, how could she find so much interest? Was her own egoism enlarging the significance of these who made her little world or was she really seeing the whole world in miniature, which was all the ordinary human eye could manage? The shaking of an empire was not more agitating than the imminence of Howard's disclosure about the ministry; the intrigues of diplomacy were not more complicated and needed no more skill than Mr. Pilgrim's intrusion into this life shared with the Corders, and the news of a great victory could hardly gratify its engineers more deeply than Uncle Jim gratified Miss Mole when he stepped off the dining-room table and said, "You've done Ruth a lot of good. If I'd known you were here I might have stuck to the sea a bit longer."