TEXT E Everything he saw was
distasteful to him. He bated the blue and white, the hum and heat of the south;
the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard background on
the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a sheet painted blue.
Two roads led out of the town; one branched off towards the
Ambroses’ villa, the other struck into the country, eventually reaching a
village on the plain, but many footpaths led off from it, across great dry
fields, to scattered farm-houses. Hewer stepped off the road on top one of
these, in order to avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the dust of
which was always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies
which carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like a
bundle of air balls beneath a net. The exercise indeed served to
clear away the superficial irritations of the morning, but he remained
miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt that Rachel was indifferent to him,
for she had scarcely looked at him, and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just
the same interest with which she talked to him. Finally, Hirst’s odious words
flicked his mind like a whip, and he remembered that he had left her talking to
Hirst. She was at this moment talking to him, and it might be true, as he said,
that she was in love with him. He went over all the evidence for this
supposition her sudden interest in Hirst’s writing, her way of quoting his
opinions respectfully; her very nickname for him, "the great Man," might have
some serious meaning in it. Supposing that there were an understanding between
them, what would it mean to him Ever since he had first seen
her he had been interested and attracted, more and more interested and
attracted, until he was scarcely able to think of anything except Rachel. But
just as he was sliding into one of the long feasts of meditation about them
both, he checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her That was the
real problem, for these miseries and agonies could not be endured, and it was
necessary that he should make up his mind. He instantly decided that he did not
want to marry any one. Partly bemuse he was irritated by Rachel. The idea of
marriage irritated him. It immediately suggested the picture of
two people sitting alone over the fire. the man was reading, the woman sewing.
There was a second picture. He saw a man jump up, say good-night, leave the
company and hasten away with the quiet secret look of one who is stealing to
certain happiness. Both these pictures were very unpleasant, and even more so
was a third picture, of husband and wife and friend; and the married people
glancing at each other as though they were content to let something pass
unquestioned, being themselves possessed of the deeper truth. Other picture--he
was walking very fast in his irritation, and they came before him without any
conscious effort, like pictures on a sheet succeeded these. Here were the worn
husband and wife sitting with their children round them, very patient, tolerant,
and wise. But that too, was an unpleasant picture. When, on the other hand, he
began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world;
above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter or
advantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and
spinsters; indeed he was surprised to find that the women he most admired and
knew best were unmarried women. Marriage seemed to be worse for them than it was
for men. The word "romantic" in the first paragraph of the passage means______.