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