When they left the tearoom he plunged rapidly along as if unaware of his surroundings. The whole Museum was there, unexplored, and this was his first visit. He assented indifferently to her suggestion that they should just look at the Elgin Marbles, and stood unmoved before the groups, presently saying with some impatience that here, too, the air was oppressive and he would like to go into the freshness.
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.