Her eyes brightened to his.
“I know what you mean. If I described a girls’ school to you——”
“I should have the feminine world in miniature.”
“Yes. The snobbery, the cult of convention, the little sneaking jealousies, all the middle class nastiness. I hated school.”
He was silent for some moments, his eyes looking into the distance. Then he began to speak in his quiet and deliberate way, like a man gazing at some landscape and trying to describe all that he saw.
“Life, in a neighbourhood like this, seems so shallow—so full of conventional fussiness. These women know nothing, and yet they must run about, like so many fashionable French clowns, doing a great deal, and nothing. I can’t get the hang of it. I suppose I am always hanging my head over something that has been born, or is growing. One gets right up against the wonder and mystery of life, the marvellous complex of growth and colour. It makes one humble, deliberate, rather like a big child. Perhaps I lose my sense of social proportion, but I can’t fit myself into these feminine back yards. And some women never forgive one for getting into the wrong back yard.”
His eyes finished by smiling, half apologetically.
“It seems to me that most women would rather have their men respectable hypocrites than thinkers.”
She put the tray aside, and brushed some crumbs from her skirt.
“The older sort of woman, perhaps.”