Exeter was another. Keeping the shapes of civilisation. Charming at tea parties. … Knowing all the worldly things, made of good style from her perfect brow and nose to the tip of her slender foot … made to shine at Ascot. It was only because she knew so much about Mrs. Drake’s secret drinking, that Mrs. Drake said suddenly in that midnight moment when Exeter had swept off to bed after a tiff, “I don’t go to hotels, with strange men.” I was reading that book of Dan Leno’s and thinking that if they would let me read it aloud their voices would be different; that behind their angry voices were real selves waiting for the unreal sounds to stop. Up and down the tones of their voices were individual inflections, feminine, innocent of harm, incapable of harm, horrified since their girlhood by what the world had turned out to be. … It was an awful shock. But Exeter paid her young man’s betting debts and kept him on his feet. And he was divorced. And so nice. But weak. Still he had the courage to shoot himself. And then she took to backing horses. And now married, in a cathedral, to a vicar; looking angelic in the newspaper photograph. He has only one regret … their childlessness. “Er? Have children?” Yet Mrs. Drake would be staunch and kind to her if she were in need. Women are Jesuits. …
From the first, in Eleanor’s mind, had shone, unquestioned, the shape of English life. Church and State and Family. God above. Her belief was perfect; impressive. In all her dealings she saw the working of a higher power, leading her to her goal. When her health failed and her vision receded, she clutched at the nearest material for making her picture. In all she had waded through, her courage had never failed. Nor her charm; the charm of her strength and her singleness of vision. Her God, an English-speaking gentleman, with English traditions, tactfully ignored all her contrivances and waited elsewhere, giving her time, ready to preside with full approval, over her accomplished aim. … Women are Jesuits. … The counterpart of all those Tansley Street women was little Mrs. Orly, innocently unscrupulous to save people from difficulty and pain. …
It was when Eleanor went away that autumn that I found I had been made a Lycurgan; and began going to the meetings … in that small room in Anselm’s Inn. … Ashamed of pride in belonging to a small exclusive group containing so many brilliant men. Making a new world. Concentrated intelligence and goodwill. Unanimous even in their differences. Able to joke together. Seeking, selflessly, only one thing. And because they selflessly sought it, all the things of fellowship added to them. … From the first I knew I was not a real Lycurgan. Not wanting their kind of selfless seeking, yet liking to be within the stronghold of people who were keeping watch, understanding how social injustice came about, explaining the working of things, revealing the rest of the world as naturally unconsciously blind, urgently requiring the enlightenment that only the Lycurgans could bring, that could only be found by endless dry work on facts and figures. … At first it was like going to school. Eagerly drinking in facts; a new history. The history of the world as a social group. Realising the immensity of the problems crying aloud all over the world, not insoluble, but unsolved because people did not realise themselves as members of one group. The convincing little Lycurgan tracts, blossoming out of all their intense labour, were the foundation of a new social order; gradually spreading social consciousness. But the hope they brought, the power of answering all the criticisms and objections of ordinary people, always seemed ill-gained. Always unless one took an active share, like listening at a door. … She was always catching herself dropping away from the first eager gleaning of material to speculations about the known circumstances of the lecturer, from them into a trance of oblivion, hearing nothing, remembering afterwards nothing of what had been said, only the quality of the atmosphere—the interest or boredom of the audience, the secret preoccupations of unknown people sitting near. …
Everyone was going. The restaurant was beginning to close. The west-end was driving her off. She rose to go through the business of paying her bill, the moment of being told that money, someone’s need of profits, was her only passport into these central caverns of oblivion. Forever driven out. Passing on. To keep herself in countenance she paid briskly, with the air of one going purposefully. The sound of her footsteps on the little stairway brought her vividly before her own eyes, playing truant. She hurried to get out and away, to be walking along, by right, in the open, freed, for the remaining time, by the necessity of getting home, to lose herself once more. …
The treelit golden glow of Shaftesbury Avenue flowed through her; the smile of an old friend. The wealth of swinging along up the bright ebb-way of the west-end, conscious of being, of the absence of desire to be elsewhere or other than herself. A future without prospects, the many doors she had tried, closed willingly by her
