After a stilted and awkward dinner on Chris's first night back at Baldry Court, Jenny plays the piano while Kitty sews. Describing her choice of music, Jenny makes an allusion to the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell:
I began a sarabande by Purcell, a jolly thing that makes one see a plump, sound woman dancing on a sanded floor in some old inn [...] As I played I wondered if things like this happened when Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple greeds and satisfactions and at the worst the wail of unrequited love.
Henry Purcell, who worked in the 17th century, defined English composition for centuries after his death. Jenny evidently knows his music well enough to play it by memory, and it might have been especially meaningful to her at a time of increased patriotism and national consciousness caused by WWI. (In fact, she starts playing Purcell because Kitty objects to her playing Beethoven, a German composer whom she apparently associates with England's enemies.)
For Jenny, the familiar sound of Purcell's music conjures up a vague and romanticized version of the past, in which people—typified by the imaginary woman dancing in the inn—had fewer problems to worry about. The "simple greeds and satisfactions" facing people in the past pale before the brutal war and social upheaval with which she must contend in the present. The allusion thus emphasizes Jenny's nostalgia for the past and ambivalence about the changing presence, feelings that are especially strong at a moment when Chris has mentally rejected the present altogether.
However, as soon as Jenny imagines the blissfully dancing woman, she undercuts the vision by wondering if "things like this" actually happened in Purcell's lifetime—in other words, if the past was really as pleasant as she would like to think. The events of Purcell's own life suggest that the past wasn't all that pleasant. The composer was born shortly after the conclusion of the decade-long British Civil War. Events within the novel's scope also show that the past was not easy or simple. For example, Margaret and Chris end their relationship and fall out of touch due to the pressures of class, family, and poverty, all factors that long preceded the outbreak of WWI. Throughout the novel, nostalgia for the past is complicated by suggestions, as in this passage, that it was not much better than the present.
