the world and the smoothness of life. She had reached her mother's state
of mind: she went to church, and practised religion punctiliously and
indifferently. She never stopped to ask herself whether there was any
real truth in it: she had other more positive mental difficulties: and
she would think of the mystical revolt of her childhood with pitying
irony.--And yet her new positivism was no more real than her old
idealism. She forced it. She was neither angel nor brute. She was just a
poor bored woman.

She was bored, bored, bored: and her boredom was all the greater in that
she could not excuse herself on the score of not being loved, or by
saying that she could not endure Olivier. Her life seemed to be stunted,
walled up, with no future prospect: she longed for a new happiness that
should be perpetually renewed; her longing was utterly childish, for it
never took into account her indifferent capacity for happiness. She was
like so many women living idle lives with idle husbands, who have every
reason to be happy, and yet never cease torturing themselves. There are
many such couples, who are rich and blessed with health and lovely
children, and clever and capable of feeling fine things, and possessed
of the power to keep themselves employed and to do good, and to enrich
their own lives and the lives of others. And they spend their time in
moaning and groaning that they do not love each other, that they love
some one else, or that they do not love somebody else--perpetually taken
up with themselves, and their sentimental or sensual relations, and
their pretended right to happiness, their conflicting egoism, and
arguing, arguing, arguing, playing with their sham grand passion, their
sham great suffering, and in the end believing in it, and--suffering....
If only some one would say to them:

"You are not in the least interesting. It is indecent to be so sorry for