Men are like buses

“Men are like buses” is Clara Driscoll’s comic expression for the reversal from romantic scarcity to sudden abundance. Spoken while she is surrounded by competing claims on her future, it turns an anxious and coercive situation into a familiar image of frustrating delay followed by an inconvenient crowding of arrivals.

Wording and Meaning

The expression begins with the premise that “Men are like buses.” Clara then develops the comparison through the complaint that a person can wait “for one for ages and nothing” before “three turn up at once.” Its humor depends on disproportion: the desired arrival is absent when expected, then several possibilities appear simultaneously. The line therefore describes not simply popularity, but the absurd timing of attention.

Immediate Context

Clara makes the remark after pouting with annoyance at the ritual that has placed several interested men around her. She admits that the situation is ridiculous, yet also acknowledges a small measure of intrigue and enchantment at finally having so many boys interested in her. The expression holds those responses together rather than resolving them. It lets her recognize the flattering side of sudden attention while preserving her irritation at the circumstances in which that attention has arrived.

Agency and Irony

The joke is also a form of self-possession. Clara’s comparison gives her a language of her own for a situation largely governed by other people and by the bonding ritual. Her humor does not erase the coercion: immediately afterward, she objects that girls have too little say and declares that no one should dictate whom she spends eternity with. The contrast makes the expression sharper. What sounds like a light observation about dating is spoken at the edge of a conflict over freedom, consent, and lifelong attachment.

Narrative Function

The phrase compresses the scene’s emotional contradiction into a memorable everyday metaphor. Clara is amused, flattered, annoyed, and resistant at once, and the bus image makes that mixture legible without pretending that the ritual is harmless. Its recurrence as an expression in the story’s vocabulary marks the moment when romantic abundance becomes another form of pressure: the problem is no longer whether anyone will choose Clara, but whether Clara will be allowed to choose for herself.