Here she stopped and looked at Hewet to see whether he was amused by the same things that amused her.  She was reassured.  But she thought it necessary to apologise again; she had been talking too much.

“You can’t conceive how it interests me,” he said.  Indeed, his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another.

“Why does it interest you?” she asked.

“Partly because you’re a woman,” he replied.  When he said this, Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had reverted to a childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her freedom and became self-conscious.  She felt herself at once singular and under observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst.  She was about to launch into an argument which would have made them both feel bitterly against each other, and to define sensations which had no such importance as words were bound to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different direction.

“I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the women were doing inside,” he said.  “Just consider:  it’s the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all.  There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented life.  Of course we’re always writing about women—­abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it’s never come from women themselves.  I believe we still don’t know in the least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely.  If one’s a man, the only confidences one gets are from young women about their love affairs.  But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried women, of working women, of women who keep shops and bring up children, of women like your aunts or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan—­one knows nothing whatever about them.  They won’t tell you.  Either they’re afraid, or they’ve got a way of treating men.  It’s the man’s view that’s represented, you see.  Think of a railway train:  fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke.  Doesn’t it make your blood boil?  If I were a woman I’d blow some one’s brains out.  Don’t you laugh at us a great deal?  Don’t you think it all a great humbug?  You, I mean—­how does it all strike you?”

His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk, hampered her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it appear so important.  She took some time to answer, and during that time she went over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting now on one point, now on another—­on her aunts, her mother, her father, and at last her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried to describe them as at this distance they appeared to her.