Defying the surrounding influences, she glanced back at the months following the picnic ... the shifting of the love-story into the midst of the Wimpole Street household, making her room like a little theatre where at any moment the curtain might go up on a fresh scene ... knowing them all so well, being behind the scenes as well as before them, she had watched with a really cruel indifference, and let the light of the new theories play on all she saw. For unconscious unquestioning people were certainly ruled by _something_. The acting of the play had been all carefully according to the love-stories of the sentimental books, would always be, for good kind people brought up on the old traditions. And a predictable future was there, another home life carrying the traditions forward. All the old family sayings applied. Many of them were quoted with a rueful recognition. But they were all proud of playing these recognisable parts. All of their faces had confessed, as they had come, one by one, betweenwhiles, to talk freely to her alone, their belief in the story that had lain, hidden and forgotten, in the depths of her heart; making her affection for them blaze up afresh from the roots of her being. She had _seen_ the new theories disproved. Not that there was not some faint large outline of truth in them, but that it was so large and loose that it did not fit individuals. It did not correspond to any individual experience because it was obliged to ignore the underlying things of individuality.... Blair Leighton ... Marcus Stone ... Watts; Mendelssohn, corresponded to an actual individual truth.... The new people did not know it because they were odd, isolated people without up-bringing and circumstances? They did not know because they were without backgrounds? Quick and clever, like Jews without a country? They would fasten in this story on the critical dismay of the parents, make comedy or tragedy out of the lack of sympathy between the two families, the persistence of unchanged character in each one, that would tell later on. But comedy and tragedy equally left everything unstated. No blind victimising force could account for the part of the story they left untold, something that justified the sentimental books they all jeered at; a light, that had come suddenly holding them all gentle and hushed behind even their busiest talk; bringing wide thoughts and sympathies; centring in the girl; breaking down barriers so completely that for a while they all seemed to exchange personalities. Blind force could not soften and illuminate.... There was something more than an allurement of "nature," a veil of beauty disguising the "brutal physical facts." Why brutal? Brutal is deliberate, a thing of the will. They meant brutish. But what was wrong with the brutes, except an absence of freewill? Their famous "brutal frankness" was brutish frankness, showing them pitifully proud of their knowledge of facts that looked so large,