“I’m afraid I haven’t read any Ibsen.”
“Really? ... Oh, you must read him. Awfully good, you know. Stimulating; modern; very modern. Doll’s House, you know. Rosmersholm and Little Eyolf.... And, of course, Ghosts. Absolute biological nightmare—Ghosts ... but terrifically clever.... I’ll lend you the whole lot if you’ll promise to read them.”
“Right,” she said. And she thought: “Doesn’t he like to show he knows more than I know? But if he is in love with me it won’t matter about that.” (And she could not properly have explained that thought either.)
But she kept him talking because she saw it was getting late.
§ 10
On the return journey they stopped to light the lamps at a lonely spot called Stump Cross, some ten miles out of Cambridge. She watched him as he stood in front of the machine with the acetylene glare lighting up his face and his goggles and his earflaps and his gauntlet gloves and his overalls, and, above all, his expression of stern delight. They were two solitary figures with hills rolling up and down on either side of them, and nothing in view save dim distant ridges and a gaunt sign-post which said: “To London, by Stortford, 45½ miles.”
“We’ll put on a spurt,” he said, clambering into the saddle....
As they entered the outskirts of Bishop’s Stortford at a speed of just over thirty miles an hour the full moon swept from behind a bank of clouds and lay in pools over the landscape....
§ 11
It was in the narrow and congested portion of the main street that something happened. (As a matter of fact they need not have gone through the town at all: there is a loop road, but George was unwilling to tackle a road he had not encountered by daylight.) There is no doubt that George was feeling very conscious of himself as he honk-honked his way through the crowded roadway. It was a Saturday night, and the streets were full. As they swerved round the corner of the George Hotel the huge acetylene beams lit up a sea of faces. Men and women passed them on the kerb as in a dream: girls with bright eyes and laughing faces, and men with the unmistakable Saturday night expression flitted past them shadow-like. It was ecstasy to be swirling past them all at a pace which, though not fast, had just a spice of danger in it. George, in his overalls and headgear, looked like a Viking steering his galley through heavy seas. What was more, he knew he was looking like that, and was trying desperately to look more like that than ever.