When lovely woman stoops to folly

The allusion here is to Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Olivia has been seduced and abandoned by Squire Thornhill. In her community, sex outside marriage means shame for herself and her family. She sings:

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?




 It is implied that her shame can only be extinguished by death. In twentieth-century London, however, the "art" that distracts the typist after her uninvolved and barely-consensual sex with the young man is a pop song:

When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

The central scene of The Fire Sermon, and of the whole poem, is a sexual encounter between two young people, a typist and a clerk, which takes place in a messy flat after a dinner of tinned food. The typist is too tired and disengaged to either give or refuse consent; afterwards, she is simply glad it's over. 

This seems to be a depiction of sex without involvement or consequences, in contrast to the disastrous consequences of sex and lust elsewhere in The Fire Sermon: rape, murder and cannibalism in the story of Philomela; Tiresias being struck blind; the mutilation of Oedipus; and the wounding of Amfortas in Parsifal. But Eliot is suggesting that treating sex as an automatic and meaningless act is just as morally hazardous, dehumanising the participants to the level of a human engine...like a taxi throbbing waiting.

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