By Monday morning, Jessie and Mr. Hoopdriver were having breakfast at the Golden Pheasant in Blandford.
They had spent nearly sixty hours together.
They were still trying to confuse anyone who might be following them, taking a long, winding route through Dorset toward Ringwood. Jessie expected to receive a reply there from an old school friend.
During those sixty hours, something inside Hoopdriver had changed.
When he first met Jessie, she had seemed almost unreal to him—a dazzling young woman who was energetic, confident, and clearly far above his social position. He had immediately decided that, if he wanted to stay in her company, he had to appear more important than he really was.
So he had pretended to be richer, better educated, more experienced, and better connected than he actually was.
Most of what he knew about women came from the young women he had met through his work. He had always believed that people from different social classes were supposed to keep their distance from one another.
More than anything, he was terrified that Jessie would think he was a common, uncultured man.
But now he was beginning to see that Jessie was far more complicated than he had first imagined.
She knew very little about real life, but she had an extraordinary enthusiasm for ideas. She believed passionately in freedom, independence, and breaking away from the rules society imposed on people.
She wanted to live her own life.
And somehow, her determination affected him deeply.
Before long, Hoopdriver began to convince himself that he had always believed the same things.
“Of course a man has more freedom than a woman,” he said one day, trying to sound confident. “Especially in the colonies. There isn’t half as much of this conventional nonsense there as there is in English society.”
He made several attempts to prove how unconventional he was.
Unfortunately, Jessie often took his words in exactly the opposite way from what he intended.
For example, he stopped going to church and made a great show of treating religion as nothing more than an old-fashioned habit.
“It’s just a custom,” he said. “People go because they’ve always gone. I don’t see what good it really does.”
He also made several jokes about churchgoers and their formal clothes. Most of those jokes had actually come from newspapers he had read.
Yet in other ways he was extremely careful to behave like a respectable gentleman.
During their Sunday ride, he kept his gloves on the entire time.
When they passed a church where people were gathering for the afternoon service, he deliberately threw away more than half a cigarette.
He also avoided serious discussions about books whenever possible.
He knew that Jessie wanted to become a writer, and he was afraid that saying the wrong thing might expose how little he really knew.
In the end, it was Jessie who suggested that they attend church in Blandford.
Her conscience had begun to trouble her badly.
She was slowly realizing that her grand plan for living independently was not turning out the way she had imagined.
She had read books by Olive Schreiner, George Egerton, and other writers who had encouraged women to live independently.
But she had understood those ideas with the enthusiasm of a young girl who had read far more books than she had experienced life.
In her imagination, the proper thing for an independent young woman to do was simple.
She should have her own flat.
She should spend her days studying at the British Museum.
She should write articles for newspapers until she found a better opportunity.
That was how life was supposed to work.
If only Bechamel had kept his promises.
But Bechamel had behaved horribly, destroying the plan she had made.
Now her only real hope was Miss Mergle, the liberal-minded woman who had educated her and sent her out into the world the year before.
When Jessie had left school, Miss Mergle had told her to live fearlessly and honestly.
She had even given Jessie two books to help guide her through the difficult years ahead: Emerson’s Essays and Motley’s history of the Dutch Republic.
Jessie had taken those lessons very seriously.
She hated returning to her stepmother’s household in Surbiton.
In her eyes, that household represented everything she despised.
It was full of people who talked about freedom but still behaved according to every social rule they claimed to reject.
Her stepmother, “Thomas Plantagenet,” had written a novel attacking marriage and conventional relationships.
Yet Jessie had quickly seen through her arguments.
The endless poses that women had to adopt around men irritated her.
Everyone seemed to be pretending.
Everyone was playing a role.
And the thought of returning to that artificial life filled Jessie with dread.
But what else could she do?
So her moods changed constantly.
Sometimes she became quiet and thoughtful.
At those times, Hoopdriver remained respectfully silent beside her.
At other times, she would suddenly launch into passionate attacks on society and everything she believed was wrong with it.
Hoopdriver soon discovered that Jessie was a Socialist.
He immediately hinted that his own political ideas went even further.
By this, he vaguely meant something like anarchism.
If he had known what the destruction of the Winter Palace actually meant, and if he had even known where the Winter Palace was, he might have confidently claimed to support that too.
He agreed with Jessie that women were treated unfairly.
He agreed with almost everything she said.
But occasionally he caught himself just before saying something that would completely contradict his new opinions.
For example, he could hardly argue that women should be completely independent while also complaining that a young woman should not expect a man to carry her luggage when he was busy dealing with a customer.
Fortunately for him, Jessie was so absorbed in her own problems that she did not spend much time examining him.
That was probably the only reason his many lies had survived through Saturday and Sunday.
Still, there had been several moments when she had asked questions that made him nervous.
He had begun to wonder how long he could keep pretending.
Then, on Sunday night, something strange happened.
For no obvious reason, Hoopdriver could not sleep.
As he lay awake in the darkness, he suddenly saw himself clearly.
He was a liar.
Not a clever liar.
Not a sophisticated liar.
Just a man who had been telling one lie after another because he wanted a young woman to think better of him.
For hours, he went over every false story he had told Jessie.
Then, whenever he tried to stop thinking about his lies, another problem appeared.
Money.
How much longer could he afford this journey?
How was he going to pay for everything?
Two o’clock came.
Then three.
He was lying there, exhausted and miserable, even though only a few hours earlier he had been happier than he had ever been.
It was strange how quickly happiness could turn into anxiety.