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Florence was finding home life minutely oppressive and could not muster her sympathies. For example, she did not mind making her bed every morning—she had always done so—but she resented being asked at each breakfast whether she had.
Florence, incapable of rudeness, settled her face into an attentive grimace.
And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all.
Edward knew too little about the world to be surprised by his welcome into the Ponting household.
When the rehearsal began, Edward sat quietly in a corner of the bare room in a state of profound happiness. He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now.
His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other, and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them.
