In the Year of Jubilee

'But you? You won't live with me?' 'You know my view of that matter.' Nancy kept her eyes down, and reflected. 'Will it be known to everybody that we don't live together?' 'Well,' answered Tarrant, with a laugh, 'by way of example, I should rather like it to be known…'

Jubilee-to-bondage arc resolves as negotiated separate household — plot sealed without courtroom or death — so plot scores 89.

Then a bedroom door opened, and a lady in a morning gown of the fashionable heliotrope came downstairs. She had acute features; eyes which seemed to indicate the concentration of her thoughts upon a difficult problem, and cheeks of singular bloom. Her name was Beatrice French…

Beatrice's acute face and disgust at slovenly housekeeping individuate the Peachey household before Nancy rises — ensemble cast sharp — so cast scores 88.

She broke off suddenly, and, without looking round, addressed her companions. 'You can give the third seat at the Jubilee to somebody else. I'm provided for.' 'Who are you going with?' asked Ada. 'My masher,' the girl replied with a giggle.

Jubilee set-piece energy against long domestic middle — social-realist tempo, not serial cliffhangers — so pace scores 84.

In point of respectability, it has claims only to be appreciated by the ambitious middle-class of Camberwell. Each house seems to remind its neighbour, with all the complacence expressible in buff brick, that in this locality lodgings are not to let.

Buff-brick complacence as social sentence — suburb named without picturesque haze — so prose scores 88.

De Crespigny Park, a thoroughfare connecting Grove Lane, Camberwell, with Denmark Hill, presents a double row of similar dwellings; its clean breadth, with foliage of trees and shrubs in front gardens, makes it pleasant to the eye that finds pleasure in suburban London.

Named streets and double-fronted houses map Jubilee London as respectability geography — so world scores 90.

At eight o'clock on Sunday morning, Arthur Peachey unlocked his front door, and quietly went forth. He had not ventured to ask that early breakfast should be prepared for him. Enough that he was leaving home for a summer holiday--the first he had allowed himself since his marriage three years ago.

Silent holiday escape before the house wakes — marriage as trap established before Nancy — so hook scores 87.

'Just one question,' she said at length. 'Look me in the face. Are you--ever so little--ashamed of me?' He regarded her steadily, smiling. 'Not in the least.'

Irregular Jubilee-era bond rewritten as conscious separate-house experiment — festival year fused to New Woman contract — so innov scores 90.

'Before I knew you; and before I knew myself. When, in fact, you were a notable young lady of Camberwell, and I—' … 'A notable young fool of nowhere at all.'

Shame revoked; Camberwell named without melodrama death — modern marriage closure — so ending scores 88.