he did not
in the least wish to see the diving.

"I shan't be a minute," she shouted crossly, and let her shoulders sink
once more under the comforting water. It was the first warm water she
had encountered since that night when Mademoiselle had carried the
jugs upstairs. Her soap, so characterless in the chilly morning basin
lathered freely in the warmth and was fragrant in the steamy air.
When Jimmie's knocking came she was dreaming blissfully of baths with
Harriett--the dissipated baths of the last six months between tea and
dinner with a theatre or a dance ahead. Harriett, her hair strained
tightly into a white crocheted net, her snub face shining through the
thick steam, tubbing and jesting at the wide end of the huge porcelain
bath, herself at the narrow end commanding the taps under the
steam-dimmed beams of the red-globed gasjets... sponge-fights...
and those wonderful summer bathings when they had come in from long
tennis-playing in the sun, filled the bath with cold water and sat in
the silence of broad daylight immersed to the neck, confronting each
other.

Seeing no sign of anything she could recognise as a towel, she pulled
at a huge drapery hanging like a counterpane in front of a coil of pipes
extending half-way to the ceiling. The pipes were too hot to touch and
the heavy drapery was more than warm and obviously meant for drying
purposes. Sitting wrapped in its folds, dizzy and oppressed, she longed
for the flourish of a rough towel and a window open at the top. She
could see no ventilation of any kind in her white cell. By the time her
heavy outdoor things were on she was faint with exhaustion, and hurried
down the corridor towards the shouts and splashings echoing in the
great, open, glass-roofed swimming-bath. She was just in time to see a
figure in scarlet and white, standing out on the high gallery at the end
of a projecting board which broke the little white balustrade, throw
up its arms and leap out and flash--its joined hands pointed downwards
towards the water, its white feet sweeping up like the tail of a
swooping bird--cleave the green water and disappear. The huge bath was
empty of bathers and smoothly rippling save where the flying body had
cleaved it and left wavelets and bubbles. The girls--most of them in
their outdoor things--were gathered in a little group near the marble
steps leading down into the water farthest from where the diver had
dropped, stirring and exclaiming. As Miriam wa