The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of ableism and addiction.

“Would this quiet young woman eating tonight’s chicken quenelles behind a potted palm have been more scandalous than the women who would come later in the evening to dine intimately or in great parties, with men, laughing open-mouthed over champagne and bending the fringed edges of their decolletages into the mock turtle soup?”

Klaus’s unspoken question points to the situational irony of Constance’s rejection from the dining room at the Meredith. Society dictates that a young woman such as her should not eat alone—that it would be disrespectable—but other women will come later, those who dine alone with men and those who dine in mixed-sex groups, laughing loudly and making a scene. Klaus realizes the ridiculousness of the notion that Constance, eating quietly by herself, should somehow appear more disreputable than these women.

“But her rejection from the dining room made her uncertain future seem all the more immediate.”

Constance must worry about her future because she has no reliable source of income: no family fortune or support and no resources but herself. She will have to work, and that work could spell a lack of social “respectability” that will tarnish her reputation and make such dismissals and rejections more frequent. Thus, this situation is symbolic of the future that Constance both anticipates and fears.

“Everywhere she looked these days it seemed that the people […] had become smaller than their clothes. Hollowed out perhaps by the rationing, the ravages of influenza, the usual ailments of the British damp. But maybe it was just the long years of the war itself, which could not be sloughed off in a few days of Armistice celebrations.”

World War I seems to have dwarfed individuals’ sense of significance in the world. Not only have people shrunk physically, the effect of having less to eat and perhaps having less will to do so, but they also seem to have become smaller in other ways, too.