Though the sun shone with warm encouragement as Eric swerved and rattled through the forbidding Sunday calm of Eaton Place, he was chilled by anxiety, a broken night and a sense of his own amazing rashness. Though he was still uncommitted in act, his mind had made itself up so firmly that he could not change it without a breach of faith. And now he expected to meet with one disappointment after another: Ivy had proved herself frail and not wholly truthful; he would find her to be heartless or insipid or commonplace; perhaps she would reveal a disconcerting streak of vulgarity, he might well have been mistaken in thinking her even pretty....
“I hope you hadn’t arranged to do anything else to-day,” he said, as they drove to Paddington.
“I was only going to dine with father and mother,” Ivy answered listlessly. “The usual Sunday supper.”
“Well, we can get back in time for that.”
“I don’t mind missing it for once. He’s just come back from assizes; and they always make him so pompous that mother and I can do nothing with him for weeks afterwards.”
“But he’ll be disappointed,” Eric suggested. Already a blemish! Ivy always seemed so selfish in her attitude towards her parents that she might become equally inconsiderate towards her husband. “We’ll telephone from Maidenhead to say you’re coming, and you can ask if you may bring me. I don’t mind cadging an invitation, because you remember I was invited once before and couldn’t go.”
“Oh, they’ll be delighted to see you,” Ivy answered without enthusiasm.
Was it a blemish that she acquiesced so easily? Would it have been a blemish if she had resisted? Eric told himself that he must cut short this microscopic search for faults, but he was not disposed to let her off a meeting with her parents. He would really know very little of Ivy until he had seen her framed in her own house and flanked by the formidable judge and his passive consort; a chance encounter in New York and their few stilted meetings in London revealed only her insincere social mannerisms, while in their two emotional passages she had shewn him only the tragic mask.
In the cab and in the train neither was at ease, for Eric did not know how or when to begin speaking, and Ivy stared blankly out of the window with watery eyes, accepting his arrangement and disposal of her with dull thanks from a drooping mouth. Would she always be like this? Must her vitality always be drawn from him? For months, perhaps for years, she would mourn her lost lover; Eric would have to bear with irresponsive apathy... He gave her two papers, which she allowed to rest on her knees, and tried to forget his discouragement in looking about him.
The station was crowded with men in flannels and girls in gauzy frocks, all oppressively high-spirited and resolved to enjoy themselves. Every seat was taken before the train had been five minutes in the station, and, when it started, Eric found himself squeezed between Ivy and another girl in a carriage with six aside and four men standing. He looked from one to another, contrasting the girls’ faces and bearing. There was an absurd similarity in hats and dresses, in their very shape and feature and age. All were wearing grey or white buckskin shoes, grey or white silk stockings thin as gossamer; all were wearing spider’s-web hats and low-cut dresses with transparent sleeves. Their average age was twenty; they were perfectly happy, perfectly well-pleased with themselves and in perfect health. Like that stage-army overnight at the opera, life—as a thing of ecstasy or racking pain—passed them by. Ivy watched him, as he watched them, and he could feel her arm trembling against his.