The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [23]
She said, in some confusion: "I do like things to happen."
Miss Paullie's father was a successful doctor; her classes were held in a first-floor annexe, built for a billiardroom, at the back of his large house. In order that they might not incommode the patients, the pupils came and went by a basement door. Passers-by were surprised to see the trim little creatures, some of whom hopped out of limousines, disappear down the basement like so many cats. Once down there, they rang Miss Paullie's special bell, and were admitted to a fibre-carpeted passage. At the top of a flight of crooked staircase they hung their hats and coats in the annexe cloakroom, and queued up for the mirror, which was very small. Buff-and-blue tiles, marble, gilt embossed wallpaper and a Turkey carpet were the note of the annexe. The cloakroom, which had a stained-glass window, smelt of fog and Vinolia, the billiard (or school) room of carpet, radiators and fog—this room had no windows: a big domed skylight told the state of the weather, went leaden with fog, crepitated when it was raining, or dropped a great square glare on to the table when the sun shone. At the end of the afternoon, in winter, a blue-black glazed blind was run across from a roller to cover the skylight, when the electric lights had been turned on. Ventilation was not the room's strong point—which may have been why Portia drooped like a plant the moment she got in. She was not a success here, for she failed to concentrate, or even to seem to concentrate like the other girls. She could not keep her thoughts at face-and-table level; they would go soaring up through the glass dome. One professor would stop, glare and drum the edge of the table; another would say: "Miss Quayne, please, please. Are we here to look at the sky?" For sometimes her inattention reached the point of bad manners, or, which was worse, began to distract the others.
She was unused to learning, she had not learnt that one must learn: she seemed to have no place in which to house the most interesting fact. Anxious not to attract attention, not to annoy the professors, she had learned, however, after some weeks here, how to rivet, even to hypnotise the most angry professor by an unmoving regard—of his lips while he spoke, of the air over his head.... This morning's lecture on economics she received with an air of steady amazement. She brought her bag in to lessons, and sat with it on her knee. At the end of the hour, the professor said good-morning; the girls divided—some were to be taken round somebody's private gallery. The rest prepared to study; some got their fine pens out to draw maps; they hitched their heels up on the rungs of their chairs, looking glad they had not had to go out. Some distance away from the big table, Miss Paullie sat going through essays, in a gothic chair, at a table of her own. Because the day was dark, a swan-necked reading lamp bent light on to what Miss Paullie read. She kept turning pages, the girls fidgeted cautiously, now and then a gurgle came from a hot pipe—the tissue of small sounds that they called silence filled the room to the dome. Lilian stopped now and then to examine her mapping nib, or to brood over her delicate state. Portia pressed her diaphragm to the edge of the table, and kept feeling at her bag against her stomach. Everybody's attention to what they were doing hardened—optimistically, Portia now felt safe.
She leant back, looked round, bent forward and, as softly as possible, clicked open her bag. She took out a blue letter: this she spread on her knee below the table and started to read for the second time.
Dear Portia,
What you did the other night was so sweet, I feel I must write and tell you how it cheered me up. I hope you won't mind—you