But her impression to himself was good. A French impression; that was the extraordinary thing. Without any consideration that was the impression she had made. Perhaps everyone had a sort of style, and people who liked you could see it. The style of one’s family would show, to strangers as an unknown strange outside effect. Everyone had an effect. … She had an effect , a stamp, independent of anything she thought or felt. It ought to give one confidence. Because there would certainly be some people who would not dislike it. But perhaps he had not observed her at all until that moment and had been misled by her assumption of animation.
If I tried to be gracious, I could never keep it up, because I always forget that I am visible. She called in her eyes, which must have been staring all the time blankly about the table, so many impressions had she gathered of the various groups, animated now in their unconscious relief at the approaching end of the long sitting. Here again was one of those moments of being conscious of the strange fact of her incurable illusion, and realising its effects in the past and the effects it must always have if she did not get away from it. Nearly always she must appear both imbecile and rude, staring, probably with her mouth half open, lost. Well-brought-up children were trained out of it. No one had dared to try and train her for long. They had been frightened, or offended, by her scorn of their brisk cheerful pose of polite interest in the surface of everything that was said. It was not worth doing. Polite society was not worth having. Every time one tried for awhile, holding oneself in, thinking of oneself sitting there as others were sitting, consciousness came to an end. It meant having opinions. Taking sides. It presently narrowed life down to a restive discomfort. …