Jan went about the streets thinking she was invisible … “and then quite suddenly I saw myself in a shop mirror. My dear. I got straight into an omnibus and went home. I could not stand the sight of my hips.” But with people, in a room, she never forgot she was there.
The sight of Mr. Shatov waiting for her under the gas in the drawing-room gathered all her thoughts together, struggling for simultaneous expression. She came slowly across the room, with eyes downcast to avoid the dimly-lit corner where he stood, and sought rapidly amongst the competing threads of thought for some fragment that could be shaped into speech before he should make the communication she had seen waiting in his face. The sympathetic form must listen and make some understanding response. She felt herself stiffening in angry refusal to face the banishment of her tangled mass of thought by some calmly oblivious statement, beginning nowhere and leading them on into baseless discussion, impeded on her part by the pain of unstated vanishing things. They began speaking together and he halted before her formal harsh-voiced words.
“There is always a bad light on Saturday evenings because nearly everyone goes out,” she said and looked her demand for his recognition of the undischarged burden of her mind impatiently about the room.
“I had not observed this,” he said gently, “but now I see the light is indeed very bad.” She watched him as he spoke, waiting, counting each syllable. He paused, gravely consulting her face; she made no effort to withhold the wave of anger flowing out over the words that stood mocking her on the desolate air, a bridge, carrying them up over the stream of her mind and forward, leaving her communications behind forever. She waited, watching cynically for whatever he might offer to her dumbness, wondering whether it surprised him, rebuked as she regarded him, by his unchanged gentle lustre.