1
It was a sort of formality. They all three seemed to be waiting for
something to begin. They were not at ease. Perhaps they had come to the
end of everything they had to say to each other and had only the memory
of their common youth to bind them to each other. Members of the same
family never seemed to be quite at ease sitting together doing nothing.
These three met so seldom that they were obliged when they met to appear
to be giving their whole attention to each other, sitting confronted and
trying to keep talk going all the time. That made everyone speak and
smile and look self-consciously. Perhaps they reminded each other by
their mutual presence that the dreams of their youth had not been
fulfilled. And the cousins were formal. Like the other cousins they
belonged to the prosperous provincial middle class that always tries to
get its sons into professions. Without the volume of Sophocles one would
have known he was part of a school and she would have been nothing but
the wife or daughter or sister of an English professional man. It was
always the same world; once the only world that was worthy of one's
envious admiration and respect; changed now ... "hardworked little text
book people and here and there an enlightened thwarted man." ... Was Mr.
Canfield thwarted? There was a curious look of lonely enlightenment
about his head. At the University, and now and again with a head master
or a fellow assistant-master he had had moments of exchange and been
happy for a moment and seen the world alight. But his happiest times had
been in loneliness, with thoughts coming to him out of books. They had
been his solace and his refuge since he was fifteen; and in spite of the
hair greying his temples he was still fifteen; within him were all the
dreams and all the dreadful crudities of boyhood ... he had never grown
to man's estate.... He had understood at once. "It always seems
unnecessary to explain things to people; you feel while you are
explaining that they will meet the same thing themselves, perhaps in
some different form; but certainly, because things are all the same."
"Oh yes; that's certainly so." He had looked pleased and lightened.
Darkness and cold had come in an instant with Mrs. Canfield's unexpected
reverent voice. "I don't quite understand what that means; tell me." She
had put down her fancy work and lifted her flower-like face, not
suspiciously as the other cousins would have done, but with their type
of gentle formal refinement and something of their look. She could be
sour and acid if she chose. She could curl her lips and snub people.
What was the secret of the everlasting same awfulness of even the nicest
of refined sheltered middle-class Englishwoman? He had stumbled and
wandered through a vague statement. He knew that all the long loneliness
of his mind lay revealed before one--and yet she had been the dream and
wonder and magic of his youth and still was his dear companion. The
'lady' was the wife for the professional Englishman--simple sheltered
domesticated, trained in principles she did not think about and living
by them; revering professional and professionally successful men; never
seeing the fifth-form schoolboys they all were. No woman who saw them as
they were with their mental pride and vanity and fixity, would stay with
them; no woman who saw their veiled appetites.... But where could all
these wives go?
2
Throughout the evening she was kept quiet and dull and felt presently
very weary. Her helpless stock-taking made it difficult to face the
strangers, lest painful illumination and pity and annoyance should
stream from her too visibly.... Perhaps they too took stock and pitied;
but they were interested, a little eager in response and though too well
bred for questions, obviously full of unanswered surmises, which perhaps
presently they would communicate to each other. There were people who
would say she was too egoistic to be interested in them, a selfish,
unsocial, unpleasant person and they were kind charming people,
interested in everybody. That might be true.... But it was also true
that they were eager and interested because their lives were empty of
everything but principles and a certain fixed way of looking at things;
and one could be fond of their niceness and respectful to their goodness
but never interested because one knew everything about them, even their
hidden thoughts and the side of them that was not nice or good without
having any communication with them.... He had another side; but there
was no place in his life which would allow it expression. It could only
live in the lives of people met in books; in sympathies here and there
for a moment; in people who passed "like ships in the night"; in moments
at the beginning and end of holidays when things would seem real, and as
if henceforth they were going to be real every day. If it found
expression in his life, it would break up that life. Anyone who tried to
make it find personal expression would be cruel; unless it were to turn
him into a reformer or the follower of a reformer. That could happen to
him. He was secretly interested in adventurers and adventuresses.