Certain People

Nora Frenway settled down furtively in her corner of the Pullman and, as
the express plunged out of the Grand Central Station, wondered at herself
for being where she was. The porter came along. "Ticket?" "Westover." She
had instinctively lowered her voice and glanced about her. But neither
the porter nor her nearest neighbours--fortunately none of them known to
her--seemed in the least surprised or interested by the statement that
she was travelling to Westover.

Yet what an earth-shaking announcement it was! Not that she cared, now;
not that anything mattered except the one overwhelming fact which had
convulsed her life, hurled her out of her easy velvet-lined rut, and
flung her thus naked to the public scrutiny.... Cautiously, again, she
glanced about her to make doubly sure that there was no one, absolutely
no one, in the Pullman whom she knew by sight.

Her life had been so carefully guarded, so inwardly conventional in a
world where all the outer conventions were tottering, that no one had
ever known she had a lover. No one--of that she was absolutely sure. All
the circumstances of the case had made it necessary that she should
conceal her real life--her only real life--from everyone about her; from
her half-invalid irascible husband, his prying envious sisters, and the
terrible monumental old chieftainess, her mother-in-law, before whom all
the family quailed and humbugged and fibbed and fawned.

What nonsense to pretend that nowadays, even in big cities, in the
world's greatest social centres, the severe old-fashioned standards had
given place to tolerance, laxity and ease! You took up the morning paper,
and you read of girl bandits, movie-star divorces, "hold-ups" at balls,
murder and suicide and elopement, and a general welter of disjointed
disconnected impulses and appetites; then you turned your eyes onto your
own daily life, and found yourself as cribbed and cabined, as beset by
vigilant family eyes, observant friends, all sorts of embodied standards,
as any white-muslin novel heroine of the 'sixties!

In a different way, of course. To the casual eye Mrs. Frenway herself
might have seemed as free as any of the young married women of her group.
Poker playing, smoking, cocktail drinking, dancing, painting, short
skirts, bobbed hair and the rest--when had these been denied to her? If
by any outward sign she had differed too markedly from her
kind--lengthened her skirts, refused to play for money, let her hair
grow, or ceased to make-up--her husband would have been the first to
notice it, and to say: "Are you ill? What's the matter? How queer you
look! What's the sense of making yourself conspicuous?" For he and his
kind had adopted all the old inhibitions and sanctions, blindly
transferring them to a new ritual, as the receptive Romans did when
strange gods were brought into their temples...

The train had escaped from the ugly fringes of the city, and the soft
spring landscape was gliding past her: glimpses of green lawns, budding
hedges, pretty irregular roofs, and miles and miles of alluring tarred
roads slipping away into mystery. How often she had dreamed of dashing
off down an unknown road with Christopher!

Not that she was a woman to be awed by the conventions. She knew she
wasn't. She had always taken their measure, smiled at them--and
conformed. On account of poor George Frenway, to begin with. Her husband,
in a sense, was a man to be pitied; his weak health, his bad temper, his
unsatisfied vanity, all made him a rather forlornly comic figure. But it
was chiefly on account of the two children that she had always resisted
the temptation to do anything reckless. The least self-betrayal would
have been the end of everything. Too many eyes were watching her, and her
husband's family was so strong, so united--when there was anybody for
them to hate--and at all times so influential, that she would have been
defeated at every point, and her husband would have kept the children.

At the mere thought she felt herself on the brink of an abyss. "The
children are my religion," she had once said to herself; and she had no
other.