Mary thought suddenly, this is an abomination, sitting here and having this conventional conversation when I feel so desperate and deprived and torn inside. She thought, is there nothing I can do about it?
I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.
Only the curve of her nostril and the curve of her mouth hinted, with a Jewish strength, a possible Jewish refinement.
Even now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.
I told you I was going to retire from the world. That’s still on. You remember that.
Arnold’s ‘joke’ was too obscenely good not to be taken as a portent: it was the visible part of some huge invisible horror.
Settle down! she thought. Yes, settle down into dreariness and quietness and forgetfulness and boredom.
Every manjack craving for love, and how rarely it all worked out.
He thought, this is hell, not being able to live with oneself.
Tuesday? My whole concept of the future had crumpled.
Yet she knew that it was not really the sharp tragic knife of passion that disturbed her now, it was some vaguer nervous storm out of her unsatisfied woman’s nature.
The only consolation I had was buying things. If I bought some pretty thing it cheered me up for a while.
This thought was so heavy with despair that she almost began to cry again.
Misery and drink made him a sound sleeper.
I know time doesn’t heal. That’s the silliest idea of all.
A woman in love is a great spiritual force.
You’re as wonderful as I expected, and I worship you for it.
Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.
They had become, year by year, month by month, mysterious to her, her love for them an extended pain, a web or field of force, of which she felt at times the almost breaking tension.
It is unjust, it is so unjust, was her thought. I have never been recognized as myself.