Meantime everything passes. There are always the powerful intervals. Meetings, and then intervals in which other things come up and life speaks directly, to the individual.... Except for married people. Who are all a little absurd, to themselves and to all other married people. That is why they always talk so hard when two couples are together? To cover the din of their thoughts.... Their marriage was a success without being an exception to the rule that all marriages are failures, as he said. Why are they failures? Science, the way of thinking and writing that makes everybody seem small, in all these new books. Biology, _Darwin_. The way men, who have no inner convictions, no self, fasten upon an idea and let it describe life for them. Always a new idea. Always describing and destroying, filtering down, as time goes on to quite simple people, poisoning their lives, because men must have a formula. Men are gossips. Science is ... cosmic scandalmongering. Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for the House of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly scientific. They quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip. Centuries of unopposed masculine gossip about the universe. Years ago he said there will be no more him and her, the novels of the future will be clear of all that.... Poetry nothing. Religion nothing. Women a biological contrivance. And now. Women still a sort of attachment to life, useful, or delightful ... the "civilised women of the future" to be either bright obedient assistants or providers of illusion for times of leisure. Two kinds, neatly arranged, each having only one type of experience, while men have both, _and_ their work, into which women can only come as Hindus, obediently carrying out tasks set by men, dressed in uniform, deliberately sexless and deferential. How can anyone feel romantic about him? Alma. But that is the real old-fashioned romance of everyday, from her girlhood. Hidden through loyalty to his shifting man's ideas? Half convinced by them? How can people be romantic impermanently, just now and again? Romance is solitary and permanent. Always there. In everybody. That is why the things one hears about people are like stories, not referring to life. Why I always forget them when the people themselves are there. Or believe, when they talk of their experiences, that they misread them. I can't believe even now in the reality of any of his experiences. But then I don't believe in the experiences of anyone, except a few people who have left sayings I know are true.... Everything else, all the expressions, history and legend and novels and science and everybody's talk, seems irrelevant. That's why I don't want experience, not to be caught into the ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the marvellous quiet sense of life at first hand.... But he knows that too. "Life drags one along by the hair shrieking protests at every yard." "Hullo! What is she doing all alone?"