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The road is dusty, the coach unbearably stuffy. The landscape has very soon palled. One valley is much like another, one ridge reveals the next. She is sweating in her stays, her waist nipped in painful imitation of adult fashion, her legs in stockings, her feet crammed into dirty white silk shoes. Not a button is to be loosened from her bodice, not a hem raised of her skirts. Clothes, like the empty conversation, the conventional diet, are to be endured. She belongs to the kind of family in which all the children are considered as miniature and largely ungrateful adults for whom the future has already been mapped out. Her brothers will never work, in the sense that engineers or doctors work. They will probably become soldiers. Though it might be privately comical to imagine these lumpy and unimaginative boys as standing in the breach at some future clash of arms, it is not so funny at all to consider her own position. Though she is hardly more than a child, her future has been even more ruthlessly dictated. What she sees in the mirror is what she is. She is a commodity. What she wants can have nothing in it that doesn’t correspond to what her parents want. Even before she has truly entered the world—as expressed by the mystery of other people—she is preparing to leave it.

Time moves as slowly and maddeningly as the coach in which she sits, but even so, in five or six years’ time, what little freedom of action she possesses now will have disappeared. Part of her commodity value is obedience to a man. It was her father, and all too soon it will be her husband. The sweat thickens in her hair and gathers behind her knees. The road unravels. At the end of it (the child’s fantasy) might be a prince, a castle, and rolling acres. The person not likely to be waiting is a poet or a dreamer, or anyone who lives in a garret. Though there is much in the world—as, for example, the young Austrian officer who leans in through the carriage window to inspect the passports, or the distinguished-looking German scholar on his way to Rome, or any of a hundred interesting examples met along the way—most of the observable world is nothing more than idle scenery. About England, where she is going, she knows next to nothing: she knows the names of shops but not the names of cities. Victoria, whose star she felt she was to follow, has turned out to be distressingly family-minded and moralistic, besotted with her prim little husband. As for her own talents, her father speaks at least as good Italian as she, her voice is untrained, her reading patchy and inconsequential. She is already a little on the dumpy side. And she is sweating.