Faith, hope, and charity—the traffic lights blaze crimson on Oxford Street and the crowd halts, black backs and black hats, more shops and more angels and more snowflakes flanking either side, hovering impatiently, neon flashing in a syncopated rhythm, the brightly lit windows festooned and lavish with desirables. Ahead, backing onto Cavendish Square, is the august London Polytechnic, where the Lumière brothers showed the first moving pictures in its vaulted, Palladian theater and where Sylvia is headed now in the deepening tourmaline twilight of winter’s approaching solstice. Farther on, just out of sight, Eric Gill’s sculpted Prospero restrains Ariel from flying out over the entrance of Broadcasting House; inside, somewhere, on Douglas Cleverdon’s desk, is a packet of Sylvia’s new poems, the transcript of the twenty-minute recording from October that the producer thinks is wonderful—the note she got from him today says so. But someone else still has to approve; it’s still not for sure. Please, she thinks. Just this once, for Christmas—the greatest of these is charity.… For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part: but then shall I know even as also I am known. Her new poems on the Third Programme could galvanize her move to London; this could be the break she’s hungry for.

The light goes green, and the crowd swells across Oxford Street. It’s worth celebrating this much even so, she thinks, checking her watch, checking her reflection in the nearest shop window, feeling smart, feeling rich, dimly registering the squeal of brakes, car horns, carols surging from open doorways; walking in tempo with the bustling crowd. No time for tea, but she’ll make it just fine to the movie, all of her purchases in tow. Through a Glass Darkly—the latest by Bergman, her favorite, about a girl going mad, the subject that just doesn’t wear out. Even better, it won an Academy Award for best foreign film of the year, boding well for The Bell Jar with its pub date only a month away. She could even consider this professional research, she thinks, rearranging her bags, jockeying for her pocketbook.