You have already seen these two young people from the outside.
The man’s name, as it turns out, is Bechamel. The girl’s name is Jessie Milton.
You have heard them argue. Now they are riding side by side toward Haslemere, although they keep a careful distance between them. Neither feels comfortable enough to speak.
So now it is time to look inside their minds.
Inside each of their heads was a little private meeting room where their desires, fears, ideas, and excuses were constantly arguing with one another. Every decision had to pass through that strange council before it became an action.
But before we enter those minds, let us consider something else: wigs and false teeth.
Someone once joked that human beings were slowly replacing every part of their natural bodies with artificial ones.
By forty or fifty, a man might lose most of his hair, so he bought a wig.
His skin became loose, so he padded it.
His teeth fell out, so he replaced them with false ones fixed in gold.
Lose an arm or a leg? There would be an artificial replacement.
Have digestive problems? There would be artificial chemicals to help the stomach do its work.
Poor eyesight? Wear glasses.
Weak hearing? Find some device to improve it.
Before long, the joke suggested, people would become collections of artificial parts, with only a tiny piece of real human life left somewhere inside.
Perhaps that sounds absurd.
But something similar has already happened to the human mind.
People are no longer born with simple, natural desires and then left alone. From childhood onward, they are taught what to admire, what to hate, what to want, and even what they are supposed to feel.
Parents teach them.
Teachers teach them.
Preachers teach them.
Newspapers teach them.
Novelists teach them.
Critics teach them.
And eventually people begin to confuse all those borrowed ideas with their own thoughts.
Someone tells us that a certain thing is wonderful, so we decide it must be wonderful.
Someone else tells us that something is terrible, and suddenly we cannot stand it.
We can even be persuaded to enjoy things we would naturally dislike.
Tell us that a particular book is boring, and we yawn while reading it.
Tell us that the same book is profound and brilliant, and we proudly discuss its greatness.
Our minds become crowded with other people’s opinions.
And when we look inside the heads of Jessie and Bechamel, we find exactly that.
Their motives are not simple.
They are buried under layers of ideas they have picked up from books, society, and other people.
Jessie has become determined to “live her own life.”
You may have heard that phrase before.
She believes she must escape the restrictions around her and become independent.
She wants to earn her own living, write novels, and live according to her own rules.
The trouble is that much of this idea of independence did not actually come from her.
It came from the books she had read.
Bechamel has his own collection of borrowed ideas.
He wants to be a sophisticated, artistic, cynical man who remains perfectly calm in every situation.
He wants to appear worldly and emotionally detached.
At the same time, he is hoping that Jessie will eventually fall passionately in love with him.
He believes passion is supposed to awaken between a man and a woman.
The books he has read have taught him that.
He also knows that Jessie admires his intelligence and his artistic reputation.
Unfortunately, he has failed to notice that she does not admire his head.
Bechamel is a respected art critic in London.
He met Jessie through her stepmother, a well-known novelist.
And from there, the two of them somehow found themselves on this extraordinary journey together.
Neither of them is particularly happy about where things have led.
Both are already beginning to regret what they have done.
But regret, at this early stage, usually takes a very simple form.
You grit your teeth and tell yourself:
“I’ll go on.”
That was exactly what they were doing now.
Their adventure had already begun to go wrong.
Bechamel knew he had moved too quickly.
He had pushed Jessie farther than he should have.
Yet he felt that his pride and his honor were now involved.
He could not simply admit defeat.
So he was already thinking about another way to approach her.
Perhaps he could find the right words.
Perhaps he could make her understand him.
Perhaps he could awaken the feelings he believed were waiting inside her.
Jessie, however, was not thinking about passion at all.
She was still too inexperienced.
Her idea of life had been built from books, novels, biographies, and the opinions of people she admired.
She had absorbed all those ideas until they had become a kind of artificial personality inside her.
But underneath that artificial personality was an ordinary young woman who had not yet had enough experience to understand the world.
She was still partly a schoolgirl.
At that age, an older man who talked confidently could seem far more interesting than a young man who was shy and quiet.
Being a famous mathematician might seem like a wonderful destiny.
Running a newspaper might seem like an equally wonderful one.
Jessie had imagined a life of independence and achievement, and Bechamel had promised to help her reach it quickly.
Instead, he was now riding beside her, speaking mysteriously about passion and looking at her in ways she did not understand.
He had even tried to kiss her.
That was, in her eyes, his most serious offense.
At least he had apologized.
But Jessie still did not fully understand the danger she had put herself in.
She thought she had simply left an unhappy home with a man she trusted.
She had imagined herself becoming independent.
She had believed Bechamel was helping her begin a new life.
She had not yet understood how completely different his intentions were from hers.
And so they continued toward Haslemere, riding side by side in uncomfortable silence.
Neither of them knew exactly what to do next.
Both were determined to continue.
And both were beginning to discover that the adventure they had imagined in their heads was very different from the one they were actually living.