All the same, he could not so easily away with modern literature, for he was suffering from the itch to write, and had already half-planned, being, like every one else, subject to the moral disease of the time, an essay on Woman. Wherry and the rest brought him up sharp: they made him very angry, but they made him perceive in himself many of the distressing symptoms he had found in them. He gave more thought to them, and, though he knew nothing of how these books were written, or of the conditions under which literature was at that time produced and marketed, he came to see these men and women as mountebanks in a fair, each shouting outside a little tent. “Come inside and see what Woman is like.” And some showed bundles of clothes, with nobody inside them; and some showed life-size dolls; and some showed women nude to the waist; and some showed women with bared legs; and some showed women in pink fleshings; and some showed naked women who had lost their modesty, and therefore could not be gazed upon without offence.
He pondered his own essay, and recognized that its subject was not Woman, but Matilda. In that gallery he could not show her, nor could he, without shame, display her to the public view. And therein, it seemed to him, he had touched the secret of all these lewd exhibitions. The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. In presentation or extension, only those shows had any compelling force in which egoism was complete and entire lack of feeling relieved the showmen of fine scruples or human decency. Where shreds of decency were left they only served to show up the horrible obscenity of the rest.
Looking at it in this light—and there seemed no other way of correlating this literature with human life—Old Mole was distressed.
“It is bad enough,” he thought, “when they make a public show of their emotions, but when they parade emotions they never had, that is the abomination of desolation.”
Matilda read some of them. She gulped them down at the rate of two in an evening, but when he tried to discuss them with her she had nothing to say about them. To her they were just stories, to be read and forgotten. He tried to persuade himself that she was right, at any rate more sensible than himself, but could get no further than the admission of the fact that she had no feeling for literature and would just as soon read a cash-made piece of hackwork as a masterpiece. That led him back to the subject of his essay and woman’s indifference to ideas and idealism. He had been considering it as a general proposition, but he was forced to admit that it was in truth only Matilda’s indifference to his own ideas, and he was not at all sure but she possessed something much more valuable, a power to assimilate ideas when they had taken flesh and become a part of the life that is lived. He knew that he was using her as a test, a touchstone, and through her he had learned to tolerate many things which his reason scouted. As a practical criterion for life and living (two very different things, as he was beginning dimly to perceive)—she was very valuable to him, but it was when he passed on to the things of art and found himself faced with the need of getting or begetting clear conceptions of phenomena, in his search for the underlying, connecting and resolving truth, that she failed him. She said he thought too much. Perhaps he did, but it was a part of his way of living, and he could not rest content with his relation with her, except he had also his idea of her. It was a relief to him, and he felt he was greatly advanced along the road by which he was traveling when he found her in the National Gallery among the five singing women of the Nativity of Piero della Francesca. That discovery gave her an existence in the world of art. He told her about the picture and took her to see it.
“Good Lord!” she said. “Is that what you think I’m like?”
She had thrilled to London. She used to say she would like to go back into the provinces just to have again the pleasure of arriving at the station and coming out into the roar of the traffic and the wonderful London smell. The shops had bowled her over. Cities she had known where there was one street of elegant shops, towns where there might be one shop whose elegance lifted it high above all the rest, but here there were miles and miles of them. She discovered them for herself, and then took her husband to see the magical region of Oxford Street and Regent Street. In Bond Street they saw a necklace just like hers, and a most elegant young man went into the shop and the necklace was taken out of the window. She saw hats and coats and tailor-mades that she bought “in her mind,” as she said, for she was still scared of money, and he could not induce her to be anything but frugal. (She would walk a mile to save a penny bus fare.) . . . When they went into Gray’s Inn and Robert removed his curtains and some of his furniture, she asked if she might buy some of her things herself, and they visited the great stores. She quickly lost her awe of them, and when she had drawn two or three checks for amounts staggering to her who had lived all her life cooped in by a weekly financial crisis, she applied her mind to the problem, and did many little sums on scraps of paper to reassure herself that she had not shaken the bank’s faith in her stability and honesty. It ceased to be a miracle to her, but she hated drawing checks to herself, for cash vanished so easily and unaccountably, while for checks made payable to tradespeople she always had something to show. In this state of mind she decided, and, as something momentous, announced her decision to buy an evening dress. It was no light undertaking. A week passed before she found the material, and when she had bought it—(for in her world you always had dresses “made up”)—she was doubtful of her taste, and as dubious of Old Mole’s. She bought the Era and looked up the address of the second girl in the pantomime, who remained to her the smartest woman of her acquaintance. Curiosity as to the address in Gray’s Inn brought the “second girl” flying to her aid; she was delighted to be of use and undertook to show Matilda the ins and outs of the shops and “the dear old West End.” She gave counsel as to trimming, knew of an admirable dressmaker near Hanover Square, “ever so cheap.” The dressmaker also sold hats, and Matilda bought hats for herself and her friend. The dressmaker also sold opera cloaks, and Matilda bought an opera cloak. The dress and the cloak necessitated, enforced, finer stockings, shoes, gloves than any Matilda possessed, and these also she purchased. . . . When all these acquisitions came home she laid them out on her bed and gazed at them in alarm and pleasure. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she changed every stitch of her clothing and donned everything new, the dress and the opera cloak, the necklace, and, as she had seen the ladies do in the theater, she wore a ribbon through her hair. In this guise Old Mole surprised her. He was ravished by her loveliness, but was so taken aback by all these secret doings, so tickled by her simplicity, that he laughed. He laughed indulgently, but he sapped her confidence, reduced all her pleasure to ashes, and there were tears, and she wished she had never come to London, and she knew she was not good enough for him, but he need not so plainly tell her so nor scorn her when she tried to make herself so: other women had pretty clothes, women, too, who were hard put to it to make a living.
He soothed her and said if she would wear her silks and fine array he would take her out next time Robert came.
“I don’t want to go out with Robert.”
“Why not?”