lives, not ghosts, frozen before they came, or unfortunates coming inevitably to this house rather than to any other, to pass on, frozen for life, by their very passage through its atmosphere. … There had been the Canadians and the foreigners, unconscious of the atmosphere; free and active in it. Perhaps because they really went to Covent Garden and Petticoat Lane and Saint Paul’s. … There’s not many stays ’ere long; them as stays, stays always. A man writing; pleased with making a single phrase stand for a description of a third-rate boardinghouse, not seeing that it turned him into a third-rate boardinghouse. … Stays always; always . But that meant boarders ; perhaps only those boarders who did nothing at all but live in the house, waiting for their food; “human odds and ends” … literary talk, the need for phrases.
These afterthoughts always came, answering the man’s phrase; but they had not prevented his description from coming up always now together with any thoughts about the house. There was a truth in it, but not anything of the whole truth. It was like a photograph … it made you see the slatternly servant and the house and the dreadful looking people going in and out. Clever phrases that make you see things by a deliberate arrangement, leave an impression that is false to life. But men do see life in this way, disposing of things and rushing on with their talk; they think like that, all their thoughts false to life; everything neatly described in single phrases that are not true. Starting with a false statement they go on piling up their books. That man never saw how extraordinary it was that there should be anybody , waiting for anything . But why did their clever phrases keep on coming up in one’s mind?
Smitten suddenly when she stood still to face her question, by a sense of the silence of the room, she recognised that they were not waiting at all for her to make a party there. They wanted to go on with their talk. They had not merely been sitting there in council at the heart of the gloom because the arrival of new boarders was beginning to lift it. They had sat like that many times before. They were grouped together between her