But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it – who can describe that?
Have we learnt the true discipline of a bankruptcy if we turn to such coinage as this? Will it really profit us so much if we save our souls and lose the whole world?
But whereas the story appeals to our curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals to our aesthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole.
Masses of work awaited him. Nothing had changed in his life. Nothing remained in it. He was back with his loneliness as it had been before Clive, as it was after Clive, and would now be forever. He had failed, and that wasn’t the saddest: he had seen Alec fail. In a way they were one person. Love had failed. Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. It could not do things.
He filled a pipe with the tobacco that he had smoked for the last six years, and watched Romance wither.
Untrue; but then, so is most information.
To be wise one might have stayed at home.
The young man named George glanced at the clever lady, and then returned moodily to his plate. Obviously he and his father did not do. Lucy, in the midst of her success, found time to wish they did. It gave her no extra pleasure that anyone should be left in the cold; and when she rose to go, she turned back and gave the two outsiders a nervous little bow.
Lucy was pleased, and said: ‘I was hoping that he was nice; I do so always hope that people will be nice.
Healthy and muscular, he yet gave her the feeling of greyness, of tragedy that might only find solution in the night. The feeling soon passed; it was unlike her to have entertained anything so subtle. Born of silence and of unknown emotion, it passed when Mr Emerson returned, and she could re-enter the world of rapid talk, which was alone familiar to her.
A young man melancholy because the universe wouldn’t fit, because life was a tangle or a wind, or a Yes, or something!
The world,’ she thought, ’is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.
As for Charlotte – as for Charlotte, she was exactly the same. It might be possible to be nice to her; it was impossible to love her.
At times, our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
I want to be truthful,’ she whispered. ‘It is so hard to be absolutely truthful.
She only felt the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
She was not a stupid woman, and she knew perfectly well that Lucy did not love her, but needed her to love.
She still clung to the hope that she and Charlotte loved each other, heart and soul.
Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and – which he held more precious – it gave her shadow. Soon, he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.
Was this the reception his action would get from the world? Of course, he despised the world as whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.