Out in the street he walked quickly along brumming to himself. She felt they had been long acquainted; the afternoon had abolished embarrassments, but he was a stranger. She had nothing to say to him; perhaps there would be no more communications. She looked forward with uneasiness to the evening’s lesson. They were both tired; it would be an irretrievable failure to try to extend their afternoon’s achievement; and she would have to pass the intervening time alone with her growing incapability, while he recovered his tone at the dinner-table. The thought of him there, socially alive while she froze in her room, was intolerable. She too would go in to dinner … their present association was too painful to part upon. She bent their steps cheerfully in the direction of home. Excuse me, he said suddenly, I will take here fruits, and he disappeared into a greengrocer’s shop emerging presently munching from an open bag of grapes. …
Supposing books had no names. … Villette had meant nothing for years; a magic name until somebody said it was Brussels … she was impressed by St. Paul’s dome in the morning because it was St. Paul’s. That spoilt the part about the journey; waking you up with a start like the end of a dream. St. Paul’s sticking out through the text; someone suddenly introduced to you at a gathering, standing in front of you, blocking out the general sense of things; until you began to dance, when it came back until you stopped, when the person became a person again, with a name, and special things had to be said. St. Paul’s could not be got into the general sense of the journey; it was a quotation from another world; a smaller world than Lucy Snowe and her journey.
Yet it would be wonderful to wake up at a little inn in the city and suddenly see St. Paul’s for the first time. Perhaps it was one of those journey moments of suddenly seeing something celebrated, and missing the impression through fear of not being impressed enough; and trying to impress your impression by telling of the thing by name … everybody had that difficulty. The vague shimmer of gaslit people round the table all felt things without being able to express them … she glowed towards the assembled group; towards everyone in the world. For a moment she looked about in detail, wanting to communicate her thought and share a moment of general agreement. Everybody was talking, looking spruce and neat and finished, in the transforming gaslight. Each one something that would never be expressed, all thinking they were expressing things and not knowing the lonely look visible behind the eyes they turned upon the world, of their actual selves as they were when they were alone. But they were all saying things they wanted to say … they did express themselves, in relation to each other; they grew in knowledge of each other, in approval or disapproval, tested each other and knew, behind their strange immovable positive conversations about things that were all matters of opinion perpetually shifting, in a marvellous way each others’ characters. They also knew after the first pleasant moment of meeting eyes and sounding voices when one tried to talk in their way, that one was playing them false. The glow could live for awhile when one had not met them for some time; but before the end of the meeting one was again condemned, living in heavy silence, whilst one’s mind whirled with the sense of their clear visions and the tantalising inclination to take, for life, the mould of one or other point of view.
How obliviously they all talked on. She thanked them. With their talk flowing across the table, giving the central golden glow of light a feeling of permanence, her failures in life, strident about the room, were visible and audible only to herself. If she could remain silent, they would die down, and the stream of her unworthy life would merge, before he appeared, into a semblance of oneness with these other lives. … She caught the dark Russian eyes of Mr. Rodkin sitting opposite. He smiled through his glasses, his dry, sweet, large-eyed smile, his head turned listening to his neighbour. She beamed her response, relieved, as if they had had a long satisfactory conversation. He would have understood … in spite of his commercial city-life. He accepted everybody. He was the central kindliness of the room. No wonder Mrs. Bailey was so fond of him and leant upon his presence, in spite of his yawning hatred of Sundays. He was illuminated; she had his secret at last given her by Mr. Shatov. Russian kindliness. … Russians understand silence and are not afraid of it? Kindly silence comes out of their speech, and lies behind it, leaving things the same whatever has been said? This would be truer of him than of Mr. Shatov … moy word. Shatov at the station with his father. You never saw such a thing. Talking to the old boy as if he was a porter; snapping his head off whenever he spoke. … She pulled up sharply. If she thought of him, the fact that she was only passing the time would become visible … what was that just now, opening; about silence?
There is no need to go out into the world. Everything is there without anything; the world is added. And always whatever happens there is everything to return to. The pattern round her plate was life, alive, everything … what was that idea I used to have? Enough for one person in the world would be enough for everybody … how did it go? It was so clear, while the voice corneted out spoiling the sunshine, … “oh yes we were very jolly; very jolly party, talking all the time. Miss Hood’s song sounding out at intervals, Halcyon weather.” … “Do you ever feel how much there is
