Chapter 1 opens as Miriam attends a lecture on socialism. She walks home meditating on her own attraction to and roots in aristocracy (triggered by being in the West End). She has a double nature from her family history: her mother's family was country gentry, loud, boisterous and flirtatious. Her father's family were puritan, gloomy, with seriousness of purpose, but also experienced, and tolerant of her. We then hear her recollection of conversation with an unnamed writer (who turns out to by "Hypo" Wilson, i.e. H.G. Wells) He draws on her experience of wide acquainance, but reduces her people to lifeless caricatures, or at least portraits. He also wants to make an activist (a "Lycurgan") of her. There is a reflection "women's art", which, according to Miriam is the making of atmospheres (although some women make bad art). Opinions, etc., do not matter to women - life does. She won't "marry her Jew" (i.e. Shatov); she couldn't have Jewish children, and would feel open to abuse in that culture. We also have her recollections of a sumemr afternoon spent with a houseful of conservative, unintellectual, houseproud & not well off women (one is the young dentist Leyton's fiancee). On the continued long walk home, we get more memories of recent months - Eleanor Dear turned up again at the boarding house, got pregnant (or maybe that was in the more distant past). As always, this chapter is filled with musings on the inner life of women. Miriam runs into an old acquaintance (from her gentrified life) in Picadilly Circus: they only acknowledge each other as straingers. And she's accepted into the inner circle of "Lycurgans" (Fenians, I believe), but doesn't feel fully committed at all. So much for the decidedly lengthy first chapter. Chapter 2 is a "Michael Shatov" chapter; she spends an afternoon with a Russian Gentile/Jewish couple, friends of Michael, who is still trying to persuade her that their union is possible. They go to Hyde Park, where they see people who are "not free" (Lintoff and his wife are socialists). Miriam feels remote and unsociable. Michael, it emerges, has determined to give up and leave; she feels a certain relief, or at least ambivalence. At home in the evening, she recalls going to a Quaker meeting in Michael's company: the stillness, the artificiality of the men in particular. She recounts how one man gave a lecture on natural history, while another, starting with quiet prayer, became bombastic, "telling God what God is." Chapter 3 is set at a house party at Hypo & Alma/Susan Wilson's, with much atmospheric description of the garden. Miriam is accepted here as part of the literary group, but she finds herself jealous of a visiting novelist, Miss Prout. This also proves to be personal jealousy, in respect to Hypo. There are many exchanges between Hypo and Miriam; they're half-obscure, half-funny, and I enjoy how Wilson tells her off. (This part of the book was a relief to me; I get very tired of Richardson's monotonous anti-male dogmatism). Other peripheral possibilities in the male department are presented. Finally, Miriam returns to the London world, where her principal dentist, Hancock (another male possibility) is leaving the practice and to her surprise and pleasure offers her a position with him. There are more, rather suggestive, memories of times at the Wilson house, and a note at the end which at least suggests that Hypo was pressing her for a sexual affair but is backing off. Perhaps it is an indicator of my banal mind, or perhaps I am learning to read Richardson a little better, but this is the first of the Pilgrimage series where I really did see an organizing principle, however vaguely applied, namely the presentation of Miriam reflected through her various masculine options.
