No. There was something within her that could not tolerate either the people or the thoughts existing within that exclusive world. In the silences that flowed about its manifold unvarying expressions, she would always find herself ranging off into lively consciousness of other ways of living, whose smiling mystery defied its complacent patronage.... It drew only her nature, the ease and beauty loving soul of her physical being, and that only in critical contemplation. She would never desire to bestir herself to achieve stateliness.
So that the faraway moment of being driven forth seemed to bear two meanings. It was life’s stupid error, a cruel blind destruction of her helpless youth. At this moment if it were possible she would reverse it and return. During all these years she had been standing motionless, fixed tearfully in the attitude of return. The joy she had found in her invisible life amongst the servants was the joy of remaining girt and ready for the flight of return, her original nature stored up and hidden behind the adopted manner of her bondage.
Or it was life’s wisdom, the swift movement of her lucky star, providence pouncing. And providence, having seized her indolent blissful protesting form and flung it forth with a laugh, had continued to pamper her with a sense of happiness that bubbled unexpectedly out in the midst of her utmost attempts to achieve misery by a process of reason.
It is my strange bungling in misery that makes everyone seem far off. A perpetual oblivion not only of my own circumstances, but, at the wrong moments, of those of other people, makes me disappoint and shock them, suddenly disappearing before their eyes in the midst of a sympathy that they had eagerly seemed to find satisfying and rare.... A light frivolous elastic temperament? A helpless going to and fro between two temperaments. A solid charwomanly commonplace kindliness, spread like a doormat at the disposal of everybody, and an intermittent perfect dilettantism that would disgust even the devil?
That was his temperament? The quality that had made him gravitate, unaided, towards exclusive things, was also in her. But weaker, because it was less narrow? He had thrown up everything for leisure to wander in the fields of art and science and philosophy; shutting his eyes to the fact of his diminishing resources. She, with no resources at all, had dropped to easy irresponsible labour to avoid being shaped and branded, to keep her untouched strength free for a wider contemplation than he would have approved, a delight in everything in turn, a plebeian dilettantism, aware and defensive of the exclusive things, but unable to restrict herself to them, unconsciously from the beginning resisting the drawing of lines and setting up of oppositions? More and more consciously ranged on all sides simultaneously. More catholic. That was the other side of the family. But if with his temperament and his sceptical intuitive mind, she had also the nature of the other side of the family what a hopeless problem.... If she belonged to both, she was the sport of opposing forces that would never allow her to alight and settle. The movement of her life would be like a pendulum. No wonder people found her unaccountable. But being her own solitary companion would not go on forever. It would bring in the end, somewhere about middle age, the state that people called madness.... Perhaps the lunatic asylums were full of people who had refused to join up? There were happy people in them? “Wandering” in their minds. But remembering and knowing happiness all the time? In dropping to nothingness they escaped forever into that state of amazed happiness that goes on all the time underneath the strange forced quotations of deeds and words.
Oxford Street opened ahead, right and left, a wide empty yellow-lit corridor of large shuttered shop-fronts. It stared indifferently at her outlined fate.
Even at night it seemed to echo with the harsh sounds of its oblivious conglomerate traffic. Since the high light-spangled front of the Princess’s Theatre had changed, there was nothing to obliterate the permanent sense of the two monstrous streams flowing all day, fierce and shattering, east and west. Oxford Street, unless she were sailing through it perched in sunlight on the top of an omnibus lumbering steadily towards the graven stone of the City, always wrought destruction, pitting its helpless harshness against her alternating states of talkative concentration and silent happy expansion. Going west it was destruction; forever approaching the west-end, reaching its gates and passing them by.
Stay here, suggested Bond Street. Walking here you can keep alive, out in the world, until the end, an aged crone, still a citizen of my kingdom, hobbling in the sun, along my sacred pavements. She turned gladly, encompassing the gift of the whole length of the winding lane with a plan of working round through Soho, to cross Oxford Street painlessly where it blended with St. Giles’s, and would let her through northwards into the squares. The strange new thoughts were about her the moment she turned back. They belonged to these old, central finely etched streets where they had begun, a fresh proof of her love for them; a new enrichment of their charm.
Whatever might be the truth about heredity, it was immensely disturbing to be pressed upon by two families, to discover, in their so different qualities, the explanation of herself. The sense of existing merely as a link, without individuality, was not at all compensated by the lifting, and distribution backwards, of responsibility. To be set in a mould, powerless to alter its shape ... to discover, too late for association and enquiry, the people she helplessly belonged to. Yet the very fact that young people fled their relatives, was an argument on the side of individuality. But not all fled their relatives. Perhaps only those of St. Paul’s evil generation, “lacking in natural affection.”
She glanced narrowly, with a curiosity that embarrassment could no longer hold back, at her father’s side of the family, and while she waited for them to fall upon her and wrathfully consume her, she met the shock of a surprise that caught her breath. They did not object. Boldly faced, in the light of her new interest, the vividly remembered forms, paintings and photographs almost as vividly real, came forward and grouped themselves about her as if mournfully glad at last of the long-deferred opportunity. They offered, not themselves, but what they saw and knew, holding themselves withdrawn, rigorously in place about the centre of their preoccupation. Yet they were personal. The terrible gentleness with which they asked her why for so long she had kept aloof from consultation with them, held a personal appeal that made her glow. Deeply desiring it, she held herself away from the solicited familiarity in a stillness of fascinated observation.