No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be.
It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.
How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?
I love the stillness of a room, after a party. The chairs are moved, the cushions disarranged, everything is there to show that people enjoyed themselves; and one comes back to the empty room happy that it’s over, happy to relax and say, ‘Now we are alone again.
The feel of her own pillow, and of her own blankets reassured her. Both were familiar. And being tired was familiar too, it was a solid bodily ache, like the tiredness after too much jumping or cricket.
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have our moments of depression, but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and... I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us.
Then all at once she turned to me, her face pale, her eyes strangely alight. She said, “Is it possible to love someone so much, that it gives one a pleasure to hurt them? To hurt them by jealousy, I mean, and to hurt myself at the same time. Pleasure and pain, an equal mingling of pleasure and pain, just as an experiment, a rare sensation?
It was disturbing, like an enchanted place. I had not thought it could be as beautiful as this.
Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us.
I could fight the living but I could not fight the dead.
They say that when we sleep our sub-conscious selves are revealed, our hidden thoughts and desires are written plain upon our features and our bodies like the tracings of rivers on a map; and no one reads them but the darkness.
It’s natural, I suppose,” said Colonel Julyan, “for all of us to wish to look different. We are all children in some ways.
The word lingered in the air once I had uttered it, dancing before me, and because he received it silently, making no comment, the word magnified itself into something heinous and appalling, a forbidden word, unnatural to the tongue. And I could not call it back, it could never be unsaid.
She laughed because she must, and because he made her;.
All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them. Something happened a year ago that altered my whole life, and I want to forget every phase in my existence up to that time. Those days are finished. They are blotted out. I must begin living all over again.
She had beauty that endured, and a smile that was not forgotten. Somewhere her voice still lingered, and the memory of her words.
Someday, somehow, I would repay my cousin Rachel.
Ambrose used to say to me in Florence that it was worth the tedium of visitors to experience the pleasure of their going.
I have no great opinion of the human race. It is just as well, now and again, that we have wars, so that men know what it is to suffer pain. One day they will exterminate themselves, as they have exterminated the rabbits. So much the better. The world will be peaceful again, with nothing left but the forest over there, and the soil.
I did not know what to answer, because it would be too sudden and too direct, but I knew in my heart that what I wanted was everything that could be between a woman and a man; not at first, of course, but later, when we had found our other mountain, or our wilderness, or wherever it was we might go to hide ourselves from the world. There was no need to rehearse all that now. The point was that I was prepared to follow her anywhere if she would let me.