Love is like a horse. It can’t be controlled no matter how hard you try. It’s so strong, that it destroys all other feelings you might have in your body. But it’s also curious and pokes its nose into challenging and sometimes even dangerous things.
It can be very distractive when you, for example, are working or talking with other people. You can always feel it in the back of your mind.
In this short story we find ourselves at a museum. And usually when you’re at a museum the time passes with looking and watching. Looking at dead artist’s names and their art, and watching dead painter’s names and their paintings. Because usually at a museum, art are all dusty and old, and made by artists long gone.
But you don’t only go to a museum to look at some art. You can also go there to watch people looking at the art and see their different reactions and facial expression.
The first person we meet in the story is the narrator, and she’s a first person narrator. She has the point of view so what happens at the museum is turned over in her mind before we hear about it. Throughout the whole story she’s sitting at the bench, watching the Whistlejacket and the man’s absorption in the French girl. And there’s a good reason to call her an onlooker, because she’s just looking at the happening.
The man, who is sitting next to the narrator, suddenly begins to talk with her about his past. And the conversation makes the man admitting something he didn’t want to reveal. He likes young girls even though he’s sixty, and especially the young French girl because she reminds him of a girl he used to date when he was young.
The French girl is the boss in the little group of the French girls, because she has a leader’s face and she appears to be a person with authority.
Everybody at the museum is completely enthralled by the little French group and especially enthralled by the head of the French. Doris Lessing describes her like this: “One girl