Gwen gave a shrug of disgust.
“It’s all frightful and gray and deadly dull, but that never strikes me as the worst part of life in these places. It is the hideous want of privacy that revolts me, and the awful nearness of one human creature to another, the sheer impossibility of thinking, or feeling, or looking, except under observation, the horrible indecent openness of life.”
“What do you know about it?” he asked laughing.
“Oh, I have done slumming in my time, under Mrs. Meades’ wing. I like new experiences, you know. We saw a great many frightful things while the craze lasted, but the worst of all was a cobbler’s ménage. He had a wife and seven children, and they lived in two rooms, he never went out, that man, neither did his wife; she squatted on the floor all day and cleaned things with a patent soap which smelt worse than they did, and he saw all she did and thought and felt; the awful hunted look of that woman was a thing to dream of.
“While Mrs. Meades talked—‘religion’ she called it—the cobbler sewed leather, and glanced now and again at his wife in a way to make your blood freeze, and then he would hold up his awl in a ghastly fashion, and grin at her over it; it was no bit of steel he was gloating over, it was his wife’s soul held up on that awl.
“But putting husbands and wives out of the question,” she went on, “this appalling nearness of living is most horrible. One must feel for ever on a dissecting table, having one’s most hidden nerves pulled out one by one.”
“They have no nerves, and they don’t experiment on one another, those people; they don’t live enough for that, they exist in a smoky thick atmosphere of indifference.”
“That man did experiment, and his wife was not indifferent; she was nerves and nothing else.”
“These were exceptions.”
“The worst tragedies are made out of exceptions.”