No, nothing had happened as she had expected.

This quote is summative of Janine's feelings about her last two decades in retrospect. She had thought her marriage would be more fulfilling, in particular. But she has also learned to give up personal fulfillment, even in things of beauty (like trips to the beach) in exchange for supporting her husband's passion for money.

Janine looked at her husband. With wisps of greying hair growing low on a narrow forehead, a broad nose, a flabby mouth, Marcel looked like a pouting faun . . . His heavy torso would slump back on his widespread legs and he would become inert again and absent, with a vacant stare. Nothing about him seemed active but his thick hairless hands, made even shorter by the flannel underwear extending below his cuffs and covering his wrists.

This is not the description of a woman passionately in love with her husband. In fact, she looks at him with moderate disgust, as evidenced in the modifiers "flabby," "heavy," "thick," and "hairless." Since this description appears so early in the story, it also reinforces the idea of an impending physical adultery; Camus expertly misleads the reader with these details.

Yet in school she had won the first prize in gymnastics and hadn't known what it was to be winded. Was that so long ago? Twenty-five years.Twenty-five years were nothing, for it seemed to her only yesterday when she was hesitating between an independent life and marriage, just yesterday when she was thinking anxiously of the time she might be growing old alone. She was not alone and that law-student who always wanted to be with her was now at her side. She had eventually accepted him.

So many details of characterization are packed into these lines. Janine is discovered to be dissatisfied with herself and her choices in many ways. She is no longer the adept, lithe gymnast that she once was. Instead, she is succumbing to the physical realities of middle age, finding that even small exertions leave her out of breath.

It is also clear that she didn't enter into this marriage with great excitement. She "hesitat[ed] between an independent life and marriage." She considered living her own life, free to make her own choices, at least for a while longer, before she "accepted" Marcel. This verb is crucial in understanding the foundation upon which she has built her marriage. She wasn't thrilled with her choice even in the beginning, but entered into the union passively and with resignation. In the end, she has chosen Marcel not over other men but over the idea of being alone.

Janine was feeling overcome with sleep when there suddenly appeared in front of her a little yellow box filled with lozenges. The jackal-soldier was smiling at her. She hesitated, took one, and thanked him. The jackal pocketed the box and simultaneously swallowed his smile. Now he was staring at the road, straight in front of him.

This is another point when Camus expertly crafts the details to lead the reader astray. It seems as though Janine is interested in this soldier romantically; she is drawn to the details of his smile and gaze. However, nothing ever comes of these subtle interactions which at first seem to be building toward more.

A cold, harsh light came from the deep holes that opened up in the thickness of the clouds. They had now left the square. They were walking in narrow streets along earthen walls over which hung rotted December roses or, from time to time, a pomegranate, dried and wormy. An...