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.
A really malicious letter should be read once only and destroyed, or best of all not read at all. These things lodge in the mind.
It is unjust, it is so unjust, was her thought. I have never been recognized as myself.
Of course you don’t know yourself, lucky old you. I just know myself too bloody well.
It’s much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it.
His peace depends on seeing me as unattainable, as an angel. It will hurt terribly when it turns out that I am only a woman after all.
Little pictures out of hell.