interested in it, they were like people who had climbed a hill and were eagerly intent on what they could see on the other side. It was refreshing and also in some way comforting to be with them. They represented something in life that was going to increase. Perhaps it would increase too much; they seemed so headlong and unaware of anything else. Did she want a world made up of women like this? If she spoke to them they would assume she was one of themselves and look busily at her with unseeing eyes, fixed only on all the things they thought about, until they perceived that she was a fraud. Long intercourse with them might make her able to talk like they did, but never to think in the way they did. Never to have the extraordinary busy assured appearance presented by their persons when you could not see their eager faces; a look that made them seem to be going very fast in some direction that completely satisfied them, so that if a fire broke out behind them suddenly they would regard it not as an adventure that might have been expected but as an annoying interruption, like tripping over a stone. …
She could see that when he read the sonnets he forgot how learned he was. The little lecture had had its own fascination. But it was a lecture; something told by a specialist to an audience. This was Dante’s voice, and they all listened as they could; the lecturer as well. All his knowledge was put aside and he listened as he read. She sat listening, her shocked mind still condemning her for not having discovered for herself that it was wrong to have a post-office savings account and that betting and gambling and lotteries were wrong because they produced nothing. For a time she flashed about with the searchlight of the new definition of vice … money can’t produce money … then all trade was wrong in some way … dissipation of value without production … there was some principle that all civilisation was breaking … how did this man know that it was wrong to imagine affection if there was no affection in your life, that dreaming and brooding was a sort of beastliness … love was actual and practical, moving all the spheres and informing the mind. That was true. That was the truth about everything. But who could attain to it? Dante