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41 " And all the time, as the train went whirling through reverberant tunnels, then out into the unspeakable' squalors of the East End — Bow, Stepney, Whitechapel, Barking — she was thinking how strangely unromantic this honeymoon journey was contrasting it, in spite of herself, with that other southward journey in the Blue Train with Ledwyche. She didn’t love Ledwyche; she supposed she did love Cyril. And yet, when she came to think of it, how safe she had felt with the other — how many essential, though trivial, things they had had in common! Trivial? Were they so trivial after all? Weren’t they, in fact, the whole basic structure of her life, her birth, her breeding? With Ledwyche, she knew just exactly where she was, while' 'with this dark stranger. . . . It came as a shock to her to remember that she didn’t even know his name, nor he hers. That, to begin with, was enough to make the' whole adventure unreal, unsubstantial, uncertain. Yet, hadn’t they agreed — oh, long ago! — that it was this very circumstance that made the affair so romantically thrilling? Eros and Psyche! . . . To question the illusion was to shatter it. And yet she knew nothing about him, nothing whatever, except that they shared a few tastes and theories. Why, for all she knew, he might even be a criminal, a murderer! “Well, here I am,” she thought. “Ca y est! I’ve got to go through with it.” And of course, to be logical, this journey had not begun at Liverpool Street that morning; it had begun at the moment when Ledwyche had shown her into the train at Cannes. It would end, God knew how, in some sordid lodging in Southend. “I’m a free woman,” she told herself. “Well, this is the price of freedom. "
― Francis Brett Young , The Cage Bird and Other Stories
42 " I want you to be my mistress.” Of course she had known what was coming; yet, when it came, some radical prudishness within her was offended by the word. She stifled its promptings vigorously. They were unworthy of her — unworthy of her fine, free, emancipated, passionate modernity. What would become of their frank and glorious equality, their high-flown theories, if she refused him? And yet... "
43 " All the' expensive artificialities of life at Cannes, where one saw exactly the same people as at home in slightly thinner clothes, bored her equally. Their transplanted conventions made her feel a traitor to her kind. Her only relief from that hothouse atmosphere was to be found in the flowery foothills of the Maritime Alps, where she went for long, lonely walks, always thinking of Cyril, in a pagan setting that called for his faun-like presence. "
44 " All through the journey, except when she was locked in her sleeper, he did his manly best to entertain her with his rich store of personal and political gossip; but his best, alas, was far too manly for Helena. "
45 " Their friendship — they were both of them careful to insist upon that word — was a thing elusive and moth-like, an unreal emanation of the sweet London dusk from which any intrusion of the material, the physical, might brush the bloom. They were primarily concerned with each other’s minds and souls. This was, they assured each other, an intellectual comradeship in which two young, eager minds, with eyes wide open, were pre- pared to discuss any subject under the sun. With a cold and exalted detachment they debated not only the arts — which, naturally, were much more important than life — but problems of human conduct, such as Communism (they were both Communists, of course), prostitution, birth-control. At first these discussions filled poor Helena with confusion, for no living Pomfret had ever spoken of such things, but Cyril, when he saw her confused, became almost stern. To be capable of being shocked was a bourgeois trait; and when once she had got over her first awkwardness she found a certain elevated excitement in calling spades spades. Cyril noticed this, and approved. It was something of an achievement to have educated this little mouse from Clapham up to his own intellectual level. It made him ruthless, haughty, patronising towards her; and Helena didn’t mind. Indeed, she found an odd satisfaction in the docile humility with which she accepted his views on free trade, free verse and free love. [...]And the beauty of the whole thing was this: that apart from their meeting and parting kisses, which, occasionally, on his side, were disturbingly ardent, their relations, so far, had been rigidly Platonic. He had never, in a vulgar way, attempted to make love to her. They went floating, divided like another and undesirous Paolo and Francesca, through an intellectual heaven. Impersonally. . . . She sometimes wondered how long this blessed impersonality would last [...] "
― Francis Brett Young
