The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she could not see why that adjective should occur to her.  There was no white cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their images on a gleaming table.  The food was all either very hot or very cold.  She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was being appalled by the bareness of the room.  Her intuition informed that if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation would look very much like this.  She knitted her brows and said “Imphm” to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion’s vehement exclamation, “Oh, when will Richard come!  I wish he would come soon.”  Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, “It’ll be nice for you, dear, when Richard comes,” and would not have clouded her dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his notice.

She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, “We’re awful reactionary, letting our whole lives revolve round a man.”

“Reactionary?” repeated Marion.  It had always been Ellen’s complaint that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for some reason with uneasiness.  “I don’t think so.  If I had a daughter who was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her.  But I don’t know.  Perhaps I’m reactionary.  Because I don’t really believe that any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?”

Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the Feminist question.  “Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is,” she said stoutly, “but as wonderful as any other man.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Marion.  “Women are such dependent things.  They’re dependent on their weak frames and their personal relationships.  Illness can make a woman’s sun go out so easily.  And then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the world, she is so liable to be unhappy.  These are handicaps most women don’t get over.  And then, since men don’t love us nearly as much as we love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful with.”

Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by Richard just as much as she loved him.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know.  It’s annoying the way that one comes to the end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning.”  She stood up petulantly.  “Let’s go upstairs.”  Ellen followed Marion up to the big sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would not like it.  She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way.  She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned the meaning of life as one lived it.