PARADISE
Maggie had never really been happy before.She had of course not known this; her adventures in introspection had been very few, besides she had not known what happiness looked like; her father, her uncle, and her aunts were not exactly happy people...
Now she flung herself without thought or care into a flood of happiness, and as sometimes occurs in life, she was granted by the gods, beneficent or ironic as you please, a period of security when everything menacing or dangerous withdrew and it seemed as though the whole world were in a conspiracy to cheat her into confidence.
She was confident because she did not think; she simply did not think at all.She loved Martin and Martin loved her; cased in that golden armour, she confronted her aunts and the house and the world behind the house with a sublime and happy confidence.She loved her aunts now, she loved Martha and the parrot and the cat, and she could not believe that they did not all love her.Because Martin loved her the rest of the world must also do so, and if they did not she would compel them.
For three whole weeks the spell lasted, for three marvellous golden weeks.When she looked back afterwards she wondered that she had not seen many things, warnings, portents, whatever you please to call them.But for three weeks she saw nothing but Martin, and for three weeks he saw nothing but Maggie.
She began her career of defiance at once by informing Aunt Anne that she was now going out every morning to do her shopping.Considering the confinement to the house that her life had always been, this was such a declaration of independence as those walls had never encountered before.But Aunt Anne never turned one of her shining neatly ordered hairs."Shopping, my dear?" she asked."Yes," said Maggie, looking her full in the face."What sort of shopping, dear?""Oh, I don't know," said Maggie."There's always something every day."Maggie had an uncomfortable feeling that her aunt had in some way mysteriously defeated her by this sudden abandonment of all protest, and for a moment the mysterious house closed around her, with its shadows and dim corners and the little tinkling Chapel hell in the heart of it.But the thought of Martin dissolved the shadows, and off she went.
They agreed to meet every morning at eleven o'clock outside Hatchards, the bookseller's, in Piccadilly.They chose that place because you could look into a bookseller's window for quite a long time without seeming odd, and there were so many people passing that no one noticed you.Their habit then was to walk to the corner of the Green Park and there climb on to the top of a motor omnibus and go as far as they could within the allotted time.Maggie never in after life found those streets again.They had gone, she supposed, to Chelsea, to St.John's Wood, to the heart of the city, to the Angel, Islington, to Westminster and beyond, but places during those three weeks had no names, streets had no stones, houses no walls, and human figures no substantiality.They tried on one or two occasions to go by Tube, but they missed the swing of the open air, the rush of the wind, and their independence of men and women.Often he tried to persuade her to stay with him for luncheon and the afternoon, but she was wiser than he.
"No," she said, "everything depends on keeping them quiet.A little later on it will be lovely.You must leave that part of it to me."She promised him definitely that soon they should go to a matinee together, but she would not give her word about a whole evening.In some strange way she was frightened of the evening, although she had already pledged her word to him on something much more final: "No,"she thought to herself, "when the moment comes for me to leave everything, I will go, but he shall know that I am not doing it cheaply, simply for an evening's fun." He felt something of that too, and did not try to persuade her.He hugged his unselfishness;for the first time in his life it seemed to him that he wanted to follow somebody else's will; with the other women it had been so different, if they had not wanted to obey him he had left them.But indeed all through these three weeks they were discovering themselves and one another, and, as though it were part of the general conspiracy, only the best part of themselves.On the top of the 'bus, as they sat close together, their hands locked under his overcoat, the world bumping and jolting, and jogging about their feet, as though indeed public houses and lamp-posts and cinemas and town halls and sweet-shops were always jumping up tiptoe to see whether they couldn't catch a glimpse of the lovers, Martin and Maggie felt that they were really divine creatures, quite modestly divine, but nevertheless safe from all human ravages and earthly failings, wicked and cowardly thoughts, and ambitions and desires.
