She intended to marry when and only when she had found the ideal person, but she was in no hurry. The idea rather bored her, and the example of her married friends (except for Walter and Sally) was, to say the least of it, unpromising.
Meanwhile, she fell in love right and left, and had many violent but short-lived love affairs, in the course of which she burnt her own fingers comparatively seldom.
The train was full of sportsmen, their wives and dogs, going North. The most depressing sight in the world, thought Jane, is a married couple travelling. The horror of it. Not only must they sleep, eat, walk, drive and go to the theatre together all their lives, but they cannot escape even in the train. It brings home to one what marriage really means more than anything else, except perhaps seeing a married couple at the bridge table. What is the terrifying chain which binds these wretched people together so inevitably? Love? Hardly, or they would look happier. Intellectual companionship? No, that certainly not; the misery on their faces is only exceeded by the boredom. Habit and convention, no doubt, aided by the natural slavishness of women. Probably they are too stupid to realize their own unhappiness. They all look terribly, terribly stupid.
As Jane glanced around, her attention was particularly attracted by one couple who seemed rather different from the rest, and yet in a way typical of them all.
The husband was an example of sporting Englishman to be seen by the dozen on every racecourse and with whom the Embassy is nightly packed. He was tall, rather burly, with a phenomenally small head, mouse-coloured hair and reddish moustache. Although possessing almost classical features he was as ugly an object as could be imagined.
His wife was more unusual looking. She was immensely long and thin, so that she appeared, as it were, out of a drawing, like an object seen in a distorting mirror. Her face, terribly thin and haggard, was completely dominated by an enormously long thin nose which turned up slightly at the very end; her large dark eyes were set close together and looked short-sighted. Her mouth was simply a red line, showing up startlingly on her dead white skin with green shadows. Jane thought that she had never seen anyone look so much like an overbred horse. She even ate like one, appearing to sniff every mouthful cautiously before she allowed herself to nibble at it, as though she might at any moment shy away from the table. Her husband behaved to her just like a groom with a nervous mare. Jane felt that he must have had difficulty in accustoming her to being handled.
She was well-dressed in an English sort of way; her tweeds were perfectly cut, and everything she wore was obviously expensive. Beautiful rings gave the uncomfortable impression of being too big for her fingers, which were abnormally thin and nervous. Her pearls were real. She wore a regimental badge of diamonds and rubies on a thick crêpe-de-chine jumper. While lacking any real chic, she gave an impression of genuineness and worth so unusual as to be rather pleasant. The word ‘bogus’ could under no circumstances have applied to her.
Jane, who was clever with her own clothes, felt annoyed with the long thin woman who, she thought, might have made more of her appearance without in any way detracting from its originality.
‘And is it necessary to look as bored as that?’ Jane wondered. Of course, the husband was most uninspiring, but still she might look out of the window sometimes, or at her fellow-passengers instead of staring into space in that almost loopy way. Perhaps she had a hidden life of her own into which she could retire at will, or possibly she was in fact as stupid as she looked. Jane hoped for her sake that this was so.
At last she turned to her husband and said something. Only her lips moved, the expression of her face was unchanged. He nodded. Presently he gave her a cigarette and she began to blow the smoke through her nostrils like a horse in the cold weather.
Jane paid her bill and wandered back to her third-class sleeper. When she reached it she stood for a few moments in the corridor looking out of the windows at sunny fields with immense shadows of trees and hedges lying across them. The setting sun made a yellow mist over everything.
‘By the time I get back to England, autumn will have begun,’ she thought vaguely. Her mind was full of Albert Gates.
Jane’s love affairs generally consisted of three phases. During the first phase – which lasted over a length of time varying with the number of meetings, but not often exceeding two months – she was violently in love. When away from the object of her affections she would think of him constantly in a light which generally bore a very small relation to truth; when in his company she would force herself to be happy, although she was often disillusioned in little ways. The second phase was complicated, but rendered more exciting by
