More bondage

 Maugham has an eye for the illustrative anecdote, the "objective correlative." When Philip gets to his uncle's house, his uncle offers him the top of his egg. Philip would have liked to have an egg for himself, but they are rationed. The uncle gets more than his wife. He gets the chair with arms, she gets the one without. She rationalizes it by thinking that she would prefer not to be so comfortable because she values a certain business and asceticism. 

***

Philip is often with women that he is half repulsed by. He loses virginity to an older woman, almost out of a feeling of obligation. She turns clingy and effusive. In Paris, he makes friends with a rude and disheveled woman. He invites him to her apartment to see her art, and he finds that it is quite bad, even though she feels herself convinced that she is a good artist. He lies to her and says it is good, but when pressed he starts to critique one paintings for its visual "values." She recoils and says that it the painting she is most proud of. She appears to understand art in theory, or when looking at art in museums, but cannot apply that to her own work.  

(There is cruelty here, but Philip himself (the stand-in for the author) is not spared any of it. He is naive, has no skills, is socially inept, and is slow to gather self-awareness (though painful lessons). He is shaped by a series of friendships with other men, and is sponge-like in imitating their attitudes. He looks for authenticity everywhere but in himself.) 

One feels the scene of the bad artist is an objective correlative of the distance between her self-image and the reality of the situation. (Somewhat like someone telling me once that Cornel West travels with a valet, or that the George Bush family had no books in their house.)