My brother Jem, damn him, he was the baby. Hanging onto mother’s skirts when Matt and I were grown men. I never did see eye to eye with Jem. Too smart he is, too sharp with his tongue. Oh, they’ll catch him in time and hang him, same as they did my father.
Aunt Patience, you’re talking nonsense. What is the use of an inn that cannot give an honest traveler a bed for the night? For what other purpose was it built? And how do you live, if you have no custom?
What trail of thought, confused and indirect, drove through those minds of theirs, to cloud their judgement? What waves of impulse swept about their being, moving them to anger and withdrawal, or else to sudden generosity? We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.
He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. – from a Difference in Temperament.
Mary could see that her aunt was eager to speak of things unconnected with her present life; she seemed afraid of any questions, so Mary spared her, and plunged into a description of the last years at Helford, the strain of the bad times, and her mother’s illness and death.
And I should make violent love to you behind a palm tree.
I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. I was a child yesterday. I had not forgotten.
He did not notice, every day, as I did, the blind gaze of the old dog in its basket in the library, who lifted its head when it heard my footstep, the footstep of a woman, and sniffing the air drooped its head again, because I was not the one she sought.
Robert rather lost his head, and kept forgetting things, napkins at lunch, and handing vegetables. He wore a harassed expression, like someone who has got to catch a train.
It was some personal friend of the landlord’s, who had no wish to meddle in his evening’s business, and would not show himself even to the landlord’s wife.
There was some misunderstanding,” she replied. “Your uncle bought it through a friend. Mr. Bassat did not know who Uncle Joss was until we were settled in, and then he was not very pleased.
I had the clean new feeling that one has when the calendar is hung on the wall at the beginning of the year. January the 1st.
Avrei voluto tornare indietro, catturare di nuovo l’attimo fuggito, ma poi mi resi conto che anche se lo avessimo fatto non sarebbe stato lo stesso, perfino la luce del sole non sarebbe stata uguale, avrebbe gettato un’ombra diversa, la contadinella questa volta non ci avrebbe salutati, forse non ci avrebbe neppure visti. Il pensiero aveva un che di raggelante, un pizzico di malinconia.
As soon as his laughter died away the smile faded from Aunt Patience’s face, and the strained, haunted expression returned again, the fixed, almost idiot stare that she wore habitually in the presence of her husband. Mary saw at once that the little freedom from care which her aunt had enjoyed during the past week was now no more, and she had again become the nervy, shattered creature of before.
The thought of sleep now was impossible. She was too wide awake, too alive in every nerve, and although the dislike and fear of her uncle was as strong as ever within her, a growing interest and curiosity held the mastery. She understood something of his business now. What she had witnessed here tonight was smuggling on the grand scale. There was no doubt that Jamaica Inn was ideally situated for his purpose, and he must have bought it for that reason alone.
I put Manderley first, before anything else. And it does not prosper, that sort of love. They don’t preach about it in the churches. Christ said nothing about stones, and bricks, and walls, the love that a man can bear for his plot of earth, his soil, his little kingdom.
In fact, one of the first decrees passed, the day after the storming of the Tuileries, was an order giving every municipality throughout the country the right to arrest suspects on sight.
I’ll not show fear before Joss Merlyn or any man,” she said, “and, to prove it, I will go down now, in the dark passage, and take a look at them in the bar, and if he kills me it will be my own fault.
Marat, in L’Ami du Peuple, declared that the only way to save the Revolution for the people was to slaughter the aristocrats en masse; yet if this happened the innocent might suffer with the guilty. Somehow, we no longer seemed to preach the brotherhood of man.
There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer. In the tale there would be strands of ivy clustering the walls, and barring the entrance and the house itself would have slept for a thousand years.