Jane pushed back her hair from her forehead and leant her head on her hand.
'In what mother calls "my condition,"' she went on, 'I don't think I ought to be worried, do you? I wish baby would come at once, so that I shouldn't be in a condition any more…. I'm really awfully fond of baby, but I shall get to hate it if I'm reminded of it much more…. What a rotten system it is, K. Why haven't we evolved a better one, all these centuries?'
I couldn't imagine why, except for the general principle that as the mental equipment of the human race improves, its physical qualities apparently deteriorate.
'And where will that land us in the end?' Jane speculated. 'Shall we be a race of clever crocks, or shall we give up civilisation and education and be robust imbeciles?'
'Either,' I said, 'will be an improvement on the present régime, of crocky imbeciles.'
We would talk like that, of things in general, in the old way. Jane, indeed, would have moods in which she would talk continuously, and I would suddenly think, watching her, 'You're trying to hide from something—to talk it down.'
4
And then one evening Arthur and she met at my flat. Jane had been having supper with me, and Arthur dropped in.
Jane said, 'Hallo, Arthur,' and Arthur said, 'Oh, hallo,' and I saw plainly that the last person either had wanted to meet was the other.
Arthur didn't stay at all. He said he had come to speak to me about a review he wanted me to do. It wasn't necessary that he should speak to me about it at all; he had already sent me the book, and I hadn't yet read it, and it was on a subject he knew nothing at all about, and there was nothing whatever to say. However, he succeeded in saying something, then went away.