And
it was so young. What was she? Twenty-seven? She could not be
twenty-eight. No age! A girl! And talk about experience! She had had
scarcely any experience, save one kind of experience. The monotony and
narrowness of her life was terrifying to him. He had fifty interests,
but she had only one. All her days were alike. She had no change
and no holiday; no past and no future; no family; no intimate
friends--unless Marthe was an intimate friend; no horizons, no
prospects. She witnessed life in London through the distorting,
mystifying veil of a foreign language imperfectly understood. She was
the most solitary girl in London, or she would have been were there
not a hundred thousand or so others in nearly the same case.... Stay!
Once she had delicately allowed him to divine that she had been to
Bournemouth with a gentleman for a week-end. He could recall
nothing else. Nightly, or almost nightly, she listened to the same
insufferably tedious jokes in the same insufferably tedious revue. But
the authorities were soon going to deprive her of the opportunity of
doing that. And then she would cease to receive even the education
that revues can furnish, and in her mind no images would survive but
images connected with the material arts of love.
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