The spell of the meeting with Tommy broke as she went down the little flight of steps. Here was eternity, the backward vista indivisible, attended by throngs of irreconcilable interpretations. Years ago, a crisis of loneliness, this little doorway, a glimpse, from the top of the steps, of a counter and a Lockhart urn, a swift descent, unseen people about her, companions; misery left behind, another little sanctuary added to her list. The next time, coming coldly with Michael Shatov, in a unison of escape from everlasting conflict; people clearly visible, indifferent and hard; the moment of catching, as they sat down, the flicker of his mobile eyelid, the lively unveiled recognising glance he had flung at the opposite table, describing its occupants before she saw them; the rush of angry sympathy; a longing to blind him; in some way to screen them from the intelligent unseeing glance of all the men in the world.
“You don’t see them; they are not there in what you see.”
“These types are generally quite rudimentary; there is no question of a soul there.”
“If you could only have seen your look; the most horrible look I have ever seen; alive with interest.”
“There is always a certain interest.”
The strange agony of knowing that in that moment he had been alone and utterly spontaneous; simple and whole; that it had been, for him, a moment of release from the evening’s misery; a sudden plunge into his own eternity, his unthreatened and indivisible backward vista. The horrible return, again and again, in her own counsels, to the fact that she had seen, that night, for herself, more than he had ever told her; that the pity he had appealed to was unneeded; his appeal a bold bid on the strength of his borrowed conviction that women do not, in the end, really care. How absolutely men are deceived by a little cheerfulness....
And now she herself was interested; had attained unawares a sort of connoisseurship, taking in, at a glance, nationality, type, status, the difference between inclination and misfortune. Was it he who had aroused her interest? Was this contamination or illumination?
And Michael’s past was a matter of indifference.... Only because it no longer concerned her? Then it had been jealousy? Her new calm interest in these women was jealousy. Jealousy of the appeal to men of their divine simplicity?
“... which women don’t understand.
And them as sez they does is not the marryin’ brand.”