Dreams and Painful Realities — North and South

A short chapter of suspended grief and social management. Bell is in the foreground: since Hale's death, the full loneliness of his life has become visible in a way it was not before. The friendship with Hale was doing more structural work than was apparent while Hale was alive, and without it, the Oxford fellowship and the routines of an academic life are not enough to fill what is missing. He manages this in his characteristic way, with irony and deflection, including a joke about insuring Margaret's life for a thousand pounds before her next journey. Margaret is present in the chapter in a state of continuing quiet dislocation: the ease of London does not answer what she is actually missing, and the missing thing is neither clearly named by her nor by the narrative. It is present as an absence. Shaw, who loves Margaret and understands her imperfectly, is pleased to have arranged something that seems good for her, and her satisfaction with the arrangement is mildly ironic: what she has arranged is reasonable and may help. But the chapter's emotional register, the insupportable loneliness and the small deflections of genuine feeling into wit and practicality, suggests that arrangements are not quite the same thing as resolution.