Tall and dark she was. She gave you the feeling of a snake. I seen her here with me own eyes. By night she’d come.
Death should be different. It should be like bidding farewell to someone at a station before a long journey, but without the strain.
One had no right to play about with people’s lives. One should not interfere with their emotions. A word, a look, a smile, a frown, did something to another human being, waking response or aversion, and a web was woven which had no beginning and no end, spreading outward and inward too, merging, entangling, so that the struggle of one depended upon the struggle of the other.
I found this hardly comforting, and wondered if there was not some virtue in the quality of insincerity.
I was seized with a sudden desire to laugh, to cry, to do both, and I had a pain, too, at the pit of my stomach. I wished, for one wild moment, that none of this had happened, that I was alone somewhere, going for a walk, and whistling.
With Rebecca we enter a world of dreams and daydreams, but they always threaten to tip over into nightmare.
You’re a good girl,” he said. “I’m fond of you, Mary; you’ve got sense, and you’ve got pluck; you’d make a good companion to a man. They ought to have made you a boy.
Make the drummer announce me,” I whispered, “make him beat the drum, you know how they do, and then call out Miss Caroline de Winter. I want to surprise them below.
We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before.
On the table there, polished now and plain, an ugly case would stand containing butterflies and moths, and another one with bird’s eggs wrapped in cotton wool. “Not all this junk in here,” I would say, “take them to the schoolroom darlings,” and they would run off, shouting, calling to one another, but the little one staying behind, pottering on his own, quieter than the others.
Freada said nothing was worth doing without effort. Pappy used to say that too. Everyone said it. But when things happened easily, what was the sense in driving yourself, in sweating blood?
They were ageless, they were sexless, they were neither male nor female, old or young, but the beauty of their faces, and of their bodies too, was more stirring and exciting than anything I had ever seen or known, and with a sudden longing I wanted to be one of them, to be dressed as they were dressed, to love as they must love, to laugh and worship and be silent.
For the sake of your bright eyes, Jem Merlyn.
Nat thought to himself that “they” were no doubt considering the problem at that very moment, but whatever “they” decided to do in London and the big cities would not help the people here, three hundred miles away. Each householder must look after his own.
Curious thing that the younger men of today were glib enough when they talked of ideals and how everyone must progress in a changing world, but when the crunch came they were very ready to let the older generation pay the piper.
I don’t know what stuff her gowns were made of, whether of stiff silk, or satin, or brocade, but they seemed to sweep the floor, and lift, and sweep again and whether it was the gown itself that floated, or she wearing it and moving forward with such grace, but the library, that had seemed dark and austere before she entered, would be suddenly alive.
This car had the wings of Mercury, I thought, for higher yet we climbed, and dangerously fast, and the danger pleased me because it was new to me, because I was young.
He was my secret property. Preserved for me alone...
He’s made his own hell and there’s no one but himself to thank for it.
It was unlike anything I had ever known. I had no feeling, no pain.