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.