were unmarried women.  Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it was for men.  Leaving these general pictures he considered the people whom he had been observing lately at the hotel.  He had often revolved these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur, or Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.  He had observed how the shy happiness and surprise of the engaged couple had gradually been replaced by a comfortable, tolerant state of mind, as if they had already done with the adventure of intimacy and were taking up their parts.  Susan used to pursue Arthur about with a sweater, because he had one day let slip that a brother of his had died of pneumonia.  The sight amused him, but was not pleasant if you substituted Terence and Rachel for Arthur and Susan; and Arthur was far less eager to get you in a corner and talk about flying and the mechanics of aeroplanes.  They would settle down.  He then looked at the couples who had been married for several years.  It was true that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and that for the most part she was wonderfully successful in bringing him into the conversation, but one could not imagine what they said to each other when they were alone.  There was the same difficulty with regard to the Elliots, except that they probably bickered openly in private.  They sometimes bickered in public, though these disagreements were painfully covered over by little insincerities on the part of the wife, who was afraid of public opinion, because she was much stupider than her husband, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him.  There could be no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far better for the world if these couples had separated.  Even the Ambroses, whom he admired and respected profoundly—­in spite of all the love between them, was not their marriage too a compromise?  She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for him; she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband.  It was a strange and piteous flaw in her nature.  Perhaps Rachel had been right, then, when she said that night in the garden, “We bring out what’s worst in each other—­we should live separate.”

No Rachel had been utterly wrong!  Every argument seemed to be against undertaking the burden of marriage until he came to Rachel’s argument, which was manifestly absurd.  From having been the pursued, he turned and became the pursuer.  Allowing the case against marriage to lapse, he began to consider the peculiarities of character which had led to her saying that.  Had she meant it?  Surely one ought to know the character of the person with whom one might spend all one’s life; being a novelist, let him try to discover what sort of person she was.  When he was with her he could not analyse her qualities, because he seemed to know them instinctively, but when he was away from her it sometimes seemed to him that he did not know her at all.  She was young,