The morning had threatened rain; when at length the journey to London began, the black skies yielded a steady downpour Mutimer was anything but cheerful; establishing himself in a corner of the third-class carriage, he for a time employed himself with a newspaper; then, throwing it on to Adela’s lap, closed his eyes as if he hoped to sleep.  Adela glanced up and down the barren fields of type, but there was nothing that could hold her attention, and, by chance looking at her husband’s face, she continued to examine it.  Perhaps he was asleep, perhaps only absorbed in thought.  His lips were sullenly loose beneath the thick reddish moustache his eyebrows had drawn themselves together, scowling.  She could not avert her gaze; it seemed to her that she was really scrutinising his face for the first time, and it was as that of a stranger.  Not one detail had the stamp of familiarity:  the whole repelled her.  What was the meaning now first revealed to her in that countenance?  The features had a massive regularity; there was nothing grotesque, nothing on the surface repulsive; yet, beholding the face as if it were that of a man unknown to her, she felt that a whole world of natural antipathies was between it and her.

It was the face of a man by birth and breeding altogether beneath her.

Never had she understood that as now; never had she conceived so forcibly the reason which made him and her husband and wife only in name.  Suppose that apparent sleep of his to be the sleep of death; he would pass from her consciousness like a shadow from the field, leaving no trace behind.  Their life of union was a mockery; their married intimacy was an unnatural horror.  He was not of her class, not of her world; only by violent wrenching of the laws of nature had they come together.  She had spent years in trying to convince herself that there were no such distinctions, that only an unworthy prejudice parted class from class.  One moment of true insight was worth more than all her theorising on abstract principles.  To be her equal this man must be born again, of other parents, in other conditions of life.  ’I go back to London a mechanical engineer in search of employment.’  They were the truest words he had ever uttered; they characterised him, classed him.

She had no claims to aristocratic descent, but her parents were gentlefolk; that is to say, they were both born in a position which encouraged personal refinement rather than the contrary, which expected of them a certain education in excess of life’s barest need, which authorised them to use the service of ruder men and women in order to secure to themselves a margin of life for life’s sake.  Perhaps for three generations her ancestors could claim so much gentility; it was more than enough to put a vast gulf between her and the Mutimers.  Favourable circumstances of upbringing had endowed her with delicacy of heart and mind not inferior to that of any woman living; mated with an equal husband, the children born of her might hope to take their place among the most beautiful and the most intelligent.  And her husband was a man incapable of understanding her idlest thought.