Backwater by Dorothy M. Richardson — Read

Miriam propped The Story of Adèle open against the three Bibles on the dressing-table. It would be wasteful to read it upstairs. It was the only storybook amongst the rows of volumes which filled the shelves in the big schoolroom and would have to last her for teatime reading the whole term. The Fleurs de l'Eloquence? Shiny brown leather covered with little gold buds and tendrils, fresh and new although the parchment pages were yellow with age. The Fleurs were so short... that curious page signed "Froissart" with long s's, coming to an end just as the picture of the French court was getting clear and interesting. That other thing, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Fascinating. But it would take so much reading, on and on forgetting everything; all the ordinary things, seeing things in some new way, some way that fascinated people for a moment if you tried to talk about it and then made them very angry, made them hate and suspect you.

Impossible to take it out and have it on the schoolroom table for teatime reading. What had made the Pernes begin allowing teatime reading? Being shy and finding it difficult to keep conversation going with the girls for so long? They never did talk to the girls. Perhaps because they did not see through them and understand them. North London girls. So different from the Fairchild family and the sort of girls they had been accustomed to when they were young. Anyhow, they hardly ever had to talk to them. Not at breakfast or dinnertime when they were all three there; and at teatime when there was only one of them, there were always the books. How sensible.