Their relationship is unsatisfactory from the start, limited to letters
and to snatched meetings on the fringes of family gatherings. The couple
are doomed by the very respectability from which their class has gained
so much, for they have none of the liberties of the very poor or the
very rich: where the moneyed customers at Julia's workplace can indulge
in sexual liaisons and divorces, she and Leo have difficulty simply in
finding a place in which to make love. Her great fear is that the
increasingly suspicious Herbert will present himself at the shop and –
that most lower-middle-class of calamities – "make a scene". Her biggest
resource, fatally, is her imagination.
- Sarah Waters on A Pin to See the Peepshow
(compare Marcel Berlins' utterly smug and blind summing-up: "Edith was a prolific reader of cheap romantic fiction, and had an excitable imagination" -- !)
descensus Averno facilis est