She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.
There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: “Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!” He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mockingbird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.
Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again, idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided.
The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant, was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.
It was going to be a beautiful morning, I remember thinking, as I left the house; soft and close, bursting with whispered promises, as only a daybreak in early summer can be.
I don’t want to part in any ill-humor. But can’t you understand? I’ve grown used to seeing you, to having you with me all the time, and your action seems unfriendly, even unkind. You don’t even offer an excuse for it. Why, I was planning to be together.
Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual.
Conditions would some way adjust themselves, she felt; but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.
The years that are gone seem like dreams – if one might go on sleeping and dreaming – but to wake up and find – Oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up, after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.
She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day.
Don’t stir all the warmth out of your coffee; drink it.
Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate.
There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual.
Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.
The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.
An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day.
The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.
Pirate gold isn’t a thing to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to squander and throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the golden specks fly.