Heaven he would never achieve, and the hell that he had known was lost to him.
When people suffer a great shock, like death, or the loss of a limb, I believe they don’t feel it just at first. If your hand is taken from you you don’t know, for a few minutes, that your hand is gone. You go on feeling the fingers.
She’s got the three things that matter in a wife,’ she told me: ’breeding, brains, and beauty.
When he is irritable she will soothe him. When he is tired she will rest him. When he is gay she will join in his gaiety, and when he is solemn she will be solemn too.
This is what it means to be purged. A burden lifted. Emptiness instead.
We never knew the ordinary placid routine of child life, the settled home, the humdrum day by day. For if yesterday we were in London, tomorrow would be Paris, and the after-tomorrow, Rome.
I wonder what my life would be today, if Mrs. Van Hopper had not been a snob.
I am probably a dull man. Emotionally I have had no complications. I was engaged to a pretty girl, a neighbor, when I was twenty-five, but she married somebody else. It hurt at the time, but the wound healed in less than a year. One fault, if fault it is, I have always had, which perhaps accounts for my hitherto monotonous life. This is an aversion to becoming involved with people. Friends I possess, but at a distance. Once involved, trouble occurs, and too often disaster follows.
You could stoop down and pick a fallen petal, crush it between your fingers, and you had there, in the hollow of your hand, the essence of a thousand scents, unbearable and sweet.
I wished he were less remote; and I anything but the creature that I was in my shabby coat and skirt, my broad-brimmed schoolgirl hat.
If loving a man meant this pain and anguish and sickness, she wanted none of it. It did away with sanity and composure and made havoc of courage. She was a babbling child now when once she had been indifferent and strong.
She thought of the laughing, carefree Jem who had driven her to Launceston, who had swung hands with her in the market square, who had kissed her and held her. Now he was grave and silent, his face in shadow. The idea of a dual personality troubled her, and frightened her as well. He was like a stranger to her tonight, obsessed by some grim purpose she could not understand.
Now you are here, let me show you everything,” she said, her voice ingratiating and sweet as honey, horrible, false, “I know you want to see it all, you’ve wanted to for a long time, and you were too shy to ask. It’s a lovely room, isn’t it? The loveliest room you have ever seen.
Happy in his silence yet eager for his words.
This moment now, at twenty past eleven, this must never be lost,” and I shut my eyes to make the experience more lasting.
But once a woman stole the initiative, plundered the perquisites and took the lead, what happened to the globe? The fabric cracked.
Not a single well-known personality, I shall tell the management they must make a reduction on my bill. What do they think I come here for? To look at the page boys?
No doubt it was the truth, or so distorted in her mind that, to her, it became so.
All this awaited me in the suite, while he, once he had left me at the hotel, would go away somewhere alone, towards the sea perhaps, feel the wind on his cheek, follow the sun; and it might happen that he would lose himself in those memories that I knew nothing of, that I could not share, he would wander down the years that were gone.
Bitterness goes with people when they die.