I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world in which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.
The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element --happiness, for example -- is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill.
Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (U. of Chicago Press, 1956)
In this third volume of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time it is the early 1930's and narrator Nicholas Jenkins and his friends are in their late twenties, trying to make it in both the business and social worlds the way people in their twenties, at any time, try to, by both looking behind at their years in school and looking ahead to an unknown future. People are continuing to dabble in politics and looking for love: getting divorced, switching partners, starting and ending affairs. The highlight of this volume is an Old Boys dinner where Widmerpool gives a pompous speech which is interrupted by La Bas's (their old housemaster) heart attack, after which Jenkins and Widmerpool take a drunken Stringham home and put him to bed. Jenkins then leaves to meet his lover, Jean Dupont, and is greeted with the news that Jean's husband is back in England.
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