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The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies,
“droit de cité”
it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent.
“Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.
his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to the point of calling him original. “Original! We’re all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper.
“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?” “Why not—why not—why not?” She looked a little bored by his insistence. She knew very well that they couldn’t, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason.
He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
Madame Olenska twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even—incredible dream!—from one town to another. This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon;
no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!
