The Old Wives' Tale

“They were both of them rather like racehorses, quivering with delicate, sensitive, and luxuriant life; exquisite, enchanting proof of the circulation of the blood; innocent, artful, roguish, prim, gushing, ignorant, and miraculously wise.”

This passage, from Bennett’s first description of Constance and Sophia, focuses on the physical and psychological charms of their youthful vigor. This is the picture of the girls against which the author compares the portrait of them as old women at the end of the book.

“Constance was foolishly good-natured, a perfect manufactory of excuses for other people; and her benevolence was eternally rising up and overpowering her reason.”

Here, Bennett describes Constance’s trait of wanting to believe the best about others. It’s an endearing trait most of the time, but as he notes here, it also has downsides, as becomes especially obvious in her relationship with her son, Cyril.

“In a single moment one of Sophia’s chief ideals had been smashed utterly, and that by the sweetest, gentlest creature she had ever known. It was a revealing experience for Sophia—and also for Constance. And it frightened them equally.”

This quote follows the scene in which Constance opens Sophia’s workbox, takes out the tooth her sister extracted from Samuel while he slept, and throws it out the window. The fierceness and impulsiveness of the action shock both sisters. This episode represents an early portrayal of the theme of the mystery of other minds, as the sisters are startled by their actions toward one another.

“She had thought she knew everything in her house and could do everything there. And lo! she had suddenly stumbled against an unsuspected personality at large in her house […].”

This quote describes Mrs. Baines’s realization that Sophia is willing to stand up against her. Here again, we see a character who thought they knew how others would react yet is surprised to find they think and act differently than assumed.

“They knew not that they were gazing at a vanished era. John Baines had belonged to the past, to the age when men really did think of their souls, [….] when the sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity […]. Ideals had passed away with John Baines. It is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one’s head is turned—”

Bennett includes these lines in his description of John Baines’s funeral and the subsequent changes in the Baines household. Just as John Baines’s death signifies the closing of an era for his entire generation, so does Constance’s passing at the end of Book 4.

“Real miracles never seem to be miracles, and that which at the first blush resembles one usually proves to be an instance of the extremely prosaic.”

This quote comes in the description of Sophia’s surprise to find Gerald Scales sitting by the family’s front door on New Year’s Eve. In this context, the apparently miraculous appearance after so long an absence is not really a miracle—as she discovers later, it was all a deceptive contrivance on Gerald’s part.

“Mothers have supernatural gifts.”

This quote reflects Mrs. Baines’s self-perception, as she prides herself on her knowledge of Sophia’s behavior. As soon becomes evident, however, the situation is not under her control in anything like the way she imagines.

“[…] for mothers, despite their reputation to the contrary, really are the blindest creatures.”

This comes just a few pages after the previous quote, and the two sentiments juxtapose each other. This quote reveals how differently Sophia’s perceives motherhood than her mother, which fits with Bennett’s theme on the mystery of other minds.

“She sat there full of new knowledge and new importance, brimming with experience and strange, unexpected aspirations, purposes, yes—and cunnings! And yet, though the very curves of her cheeks seemed to be mysteriously altering, the old Constance still lingered in that frame […]; you could see the timid thing peeping wistfully out of the eyes of the married woman.”

This passage describes the early days of Constance’s marriage to Samuel, as she adjusts to her new roles as wife and co-manager of the family business. Here, Bennett explores both the physical and psychological changes that time has on her but insists on the persistence of her original character through those changes.

“The naïve ecstasies of girlhood had long since departed—the price paid for experience and self-possession and a true vision of things.”

This is another description of Constance’s development during her early adulthood. Like Sophia, certain aspects of her character from her teenage years—in Constance’s case, some of her naivete—become muted, as a growing wisdom exerts itself.

“For a brief instant Cyril did not exist for Constance. Samuel alone obsessed her, and yet Samuel seemed a strange, unknown man. It was in Constance’s life one of those crises when the human soul seems to be on the very brink of mysterious and disconcerting cognitions, and then the wave recedes as inexplicably as it surged up.”

This passage is from an episode in which Constance is startled by Samuel’s insistence on being the hand of discipline for Cyril. It portrays Bennett’s theme on the mystery of other minds, showing that even after many years of marriage, Constance can still be shocked by how little she knows of her husband.

“Time and the slow wrath of God had changed her.”

This is a passing reference to the condition of Daniel Povey’s wife, as Samuel reflects on her character on the night of her murder. It’s one of Bennett’s most clear and incisive statements of his theme on the changes of life.

“Not even Constance quite knew Samuel’s secret opinion of Samuel.”

This quote, which supports the theme of the mystery of other minds, describes how Samuel would have regarded his funeral arrangements—and how even his wife of many years would’ve been unable to accurately guess his reaction.

“How she rebelled, furious and despairing, against the fortuitous cruelty of things!”

This expresses the pathos behind Bennett’s exploration of the changes of time. Constance is heartbroken that all her efforts on behalf of Cyril have only paved the way for him to leave her. This sense of a tragic bait-and-switch that fate plays on humans is a note that resounds with the novel’s broader portrayal of the unfairness of old age.

“She was nineteen. But she seemed to him utterly mature and mysterious. Her face baffled him; her mind was a foreign land.”

This quote comes from Gerald and Sophia’s meeting in London, after she has run away from her aunt to be with him. They’re shocked by one another’s different perceptions of what should be done, and these lines relate Gerald’s befuddlement toward Sophia as he wrestles with the theme of the mystery of other minds.

“In the Square she was understood to be quite without commonsense, hopelessly imprudent; yet here, a spring of sagacity seemed to be welling up in her all the time, a continual antidote against the general madness in which she found herself.”

This quote describes the development of Sophia’s character as she enters Parisian life with her spendthrift, dissolute husband. The contrast of his character with hers brings out underlying traits that she had never had to rely on before. This quote also indicates some of the influence of place in the way we conceive of ourselves: Her estimation of her own character in the context of Bursley is quite different from how it appears in Paris.

“It really did seem to her, indeed, that the Sophia whom Gerald had espoused was dead and gone, and that another Sophia had come into her body: so intensely conscious was she of a fundamental change in herself under the stress of continual experience. And though this was but a seeming, though she was still the same Sophia more fully disclosed, it was a true seeming.”

Here, Bennett shares an extended reflection on his theme of the changes of life. Sophia’s character is developing so rapidly that she perceives it as the introduction of a wholly new character, but Bennett clarifies that it’s still the same Sophia, in whom underlying traits are now being more fully disclosed.

“But she felt towards the French nation as a mother might feel towards adorable, wilful children suffering through their own charming foolishness.”

This quote reflects Bennett’s exploration of place and culture. During her early years in Paris, Sophia experiences a shift in her perception of its culture. She initially regards the character of French people as being too unrestrained, given too much to passions, and while she retains this sensibility throughout her life, she’s able to move beyond a sense of revulsion to a sense of maternal affection.

“And yet she had been guilty of the capital folly of cutting herself off from her family. She was ageing, and she was alone in the world. […] She was the most solitary person on earth.”

Sophia’s story shifts away from her marriage to Gerald and toward her single-minded focus on the business of running a boardinghouse. In so doing, she moves away from any ties to family relations, distancing her story from one of the leading motifs of the novel. The result, as this quote indicates, is that she ends up lonely, a situation only remedied when she returns home in Book 4.

“‘She hasn’t altered one bit,’ Constance thought with joy. ‘Nothing could change Sophia.’ And at the back of that notion was a more general notion: ‘Nothing could change a Baines.’ It was true that Constance’s Sophia had not changed. Powerful individualities remain undisfigured by no matter what vicissitudes.”

This passage conveys Constance’s reaction to her first glimpse of Sophia after a decades-long separation. This quote underscores Bennett’s idea that a person’s temperament and character traits don’t change in any significant way, despite all the transformations of life.

“And on the sign-boards of these establishments were names that Sophia did not know. The character of most of the shops seemed to have worsened […]. The whole scene, paltry, confined, and dull, reached for her the extreme of provinciality.”

Sophia reacts to returning to Bursley. Having been shaped by the influence of Paris for so many years, Bursley looks small and dull to her now. This quote mentions signs, which symbolize major transitions: That Sophia doesn’t recognize them indicates just how many changes Bursley has undergone since she left.

“Sophia’s life, in its way, had been as narrow as Constance’s. Though her experience of human nature was wide, she had been in a groove as deep as Constance’s. She had been utterly absorbed in doing one single thing.”

Toward the end of both Constance’s and Sophia’s adult lives, each becomes singularly devoted to a particular thing: Constance to Cyril and Sophia to running her business. This quote illustrates the parallels between their stories, even though many of the surface details appear so different.

“What affected her was that he had once been young, and that he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that.”

This quote describes Sophia’s reaction to seeing the corpse of her long-estranged husband, his features now greatly changed from when she knew him. This is one of Bennett’s clearest statements on the tragedy of life’s changes from youth to old age.