That evening Clytie spent alone. Thornton was dining at the Café des Ambassadeurs with some men from the Embassy. He had kissed her before he started, called himself a selfish brute for condemning her to a dull evening, and went away humming a café-concert air. She did not mind his leaving her, took it now as a matter of course that each should be to a certain extent independent of the other; for the glamour of the south had departed, and the practicalities of life had begun to assert themselves. But it was the first wretched evening of her married life. She would have liked to cry, but as she was not of those who cry easily, she sat with eyes all the more painful for being strained and tearless. She had received a great shock. Ever since she had rebelled against the Durdleham formula that men were to descend from their intellectual sublimity when they spoke to women, lest like Semele the latter should be consumed in the Jovian blaze, she had been accustomed to meet men freely on an intellectual level. To find herself in a society where this particular formula was unknown had been one of the earliest joys of her emancipated life. She had very little vanity in the matter of her own attainments, but she took it for granted that her associates should recognise in her a woman of ordinary culture, capable of forming rational opinions. Her intelligence was keen, her judgment fine. She had read, thought, observed. Her art was to a certain extent a matter of intellect as well as of instinctive feeling, and in this respect had been stimulated by her intercourse with Kent. In the glow of her young, ardent nature she had committed many extravagances, but they all had borne the indubitable stamp of a mind strenuous in its endeavours. None but fools had ever thought of condescending to Clytie because she was a woman.
And now for the first time she was coolly shown that she was a woman, that her opinions were not worth serious consideration, that she must not trouble her pretty-head about things that were too deep for her. And by the man, above all, whose life she shared. They were hours of dull, dazed humiliation that she spent alone that evening; hours that were not lost even in the pain of her after life. Over the absence of sympathy with her own pursuits she was only a little regretful. It would have been nicer if Thornton had been able to take a pleasure in her art. But she was too large-natured not to be able to bridge over this small gap between them. She was ready to sacrifice her art entirely to her love, was eager to throw herself into his interests and ambitions. But she demanded a full, vigorous share. To live an empty life was with her an impossibility. And to this life Thornton, in his good-natured contempt for her powers, was condemning her. She was puzzled, humiliated, frightened.
There is a vague mystery of woe in the dawn of a dreary day.
Meanwhile Thornton was enjoying himself amazingly. The dinner was one which, as Heine says, “ought to be partaken of kneeling,” and the wine was excellent; the party well chosen, the talk essentially, broadly masculine. There is a certain type of man whose conversation is wholly made up of sport in its various aspects, women, shop, and crude personal gossip—a type which numbers its tens of thousands in English society. It can be met with, to utter weariness of the soul, in any heterogeneous gathering of upper- and middle-class Britons. They are God's creatures, it is true; many of them are possessed of estimable qualities, some of them have performed deeds of heroism. But as a type they are a glaring satire upon the vaunted culture and refinement of our civilisation. And it is a remarkable thing how little their power and influence are recognised by writers in their analysis of the spirit of this dying nineteenth century. This vast overwhelming type does not read, does not think, does not care for art or music, has no power of penetration to the heart of delicate things. It is dull, brawny, selfish, and a pillar of the Church and State. Its main subjective characteristic is the brutality of its views concerning women—varying from the kindly disdain of its highest members to the degraded brutality of its lowest.
Of this type, with all his physical charm, his brilliant personality and splendid capacities for action, was Thornton Hammerdyke. The man whose magnetism had drawn Clytie irresistibly, headlong into his arms was only, after all, a representative of this ignoble, commonplace order of men. The love that had flooded Clytie's being with wild surging tumult was only, after all, the commonplace, ignoble passion of his type. There are some things so elementary that analysis quickly comes to an end. Put in a strip of litmus paper and it is done.
He was honestly glad to be free of Clytie. With unconscious cynicism he never sought to disguise it from himself. With Carteret of the Hussars and Swithin and Holyoake of the Embassy he was in his proper sphere. They were of the type. He had interests in common with them. The fact that he was a man of high distinction was neither here nor there. Over the fish and entrées they talked of racing and shooting; over the game they wandered along the upper galleries of the Cloaca Maxima of Paris; over the peaches and Château-Mouton they told foul stories. An ignoble, commonplace dinner party.
And Clytie was alone in her room at the hotel staring at an unknown future.