5
Going homewards through the spring evening with Densley she felt the world even further off; thin, irrelevant. That was his influence. For him the world was something against which everyone was fighting with weapons feeble or stout. Single people, the individual battle, that was the centre of his preoccupation. His interest in Mrs. Wheeler was his sense that she was making a good fight, sturdily, perhaps unscrupulously ... that she was what he would call a real woman. Herself he regarded as so far unreal, good material for reality, holding back.
His wide, varied experience of humanity seemed all about them, as they wandered at truce arm-in-arm through the darkened evening streets. And she found herself, as always, leaning upon his ordered knowledge and yet repudiating it, so entirely did it imply an incomplete conception of life. Every symbol he used called up the image of life as process, never in any direction as completeness.
Faced alone, it appeared to him as bitterly sad, and the last disaster of an unhappy fate.
Faced in groups as he knew it best, it showed in his eyes only as material for comedy. It was of the comedy he was always trying to convince her. In life itself the bare fact of life, there seemed for him to be no splendour. For men there was ambition, hard work and kindly deeds by the way. And for women motherhood. Sacred. The way to it pure comedy; but once attained, life for the mother in a mansion of the spirit unknown to men, closed against them and forever inaccessible. The attainment of full womanhood was farewell, a lonely treading of a temple, surrounded by outcasts.
He stood, it was true, to some extent within the lives of women, but witnessed again and again the farewell, saw the man lessened, left behind for ever on the threshold of magnificence, the woman left in a loneliness mitigated only by the fireside companionship.
The strange thing was that seeming to value her for what he called the intellectual heights that had kept her uncorrupted by petty social life, he yet wanted her to come down from them and join the crowd. That if even for one moment she could show any unguarded feeling, anything free from criticism, even deliberately freed from criticism, he was ready to become the gay priest of initiation into the comedy whose every dramatic possibility he knew by heart.