He was being the scrupulously honorable gentleman, she realized, protecting her name, taking the consequences of his own indiscretion. She understood all that and was grateful for it. And resentful of it. How helpless women were. The pawns of men. To be tripped up and pitched headlong into the dirt by men, and then to be picked up by them and dusted off and restored to uprightness. But that was the way of the world.
The only thing over which we have any control whatsoever is the very next decision we make.
She could not expect any man to love her that deeply if she did not also understand that he simply was, and that his wasness or isness made him forever the love of her heart. The love of her life.
Why would forgiveness be of any value if it were reserved only for forgivable offenses?
But if you do get to know me, please let me know what you discover. I have no idea who I am.
Love wasn’t about reasons. It wasn’t about admiring fine qualities. Love was a language all on its own, composed of gestures that seemed incomprehensible, perhaps even pointless, to the outside observer. Speaking.
Sometimes one feels the need of a word more powerful than love, or at least one more exclusive to the love of one’s heart.
Miss Manford’s hands flapped ineffectually while she chanted, ‘Bless my soul!’ to a God who would have been deafened had he been foolish enough to listen.
When you read this, I shall be gone. I shall not tell you where I am going, because I do not intend ever to return.
Their love had developed out of friendship; friendship helped it deepen.
I want you, my dear. I do believe I have fallen in love with you. What a nasty ailment that may prove to be! I have not suffered from it before. Is it deadly, do you suppose? Is it a terminal illness?
The silence extended between them. A silence that was gradually filled with unspoken words, almost as if their minds connected though they did not speak.
What a dreadful fate it was sometimes to be a woman. To be dependent. To have to sit and wait. To be helpless to order one’s own life no matter how carefully and sensibly one tried to plan.
Even as the awareness was speaking itself to her mind it was gone, beyond her grasp, beyond recall. A little flash of heaven, which was a something or a state of being beyond either place or time or the ability to be expressed in words and was therefore to be sensed fleetingly but never to be grasped.
But she knew she would not sleep until she had somehow sorted through her thoughts about the night before. She pulled a chair to the window, blew out the candle, and sat looking out onto the moonlit lawns and trees.
She felt relaxed, happy, and sadder than she had ever felt in her life before.
I am too tired to see you work longer today.
Sit down, please. It makes me tired to see you stand there.
She wanted it to last forever. She wanted him in her. She wanted release. She could not endure much longer without release. But not yet. Not yet. She wanted the wanting him to go on forever. She did not want thought or sanity or the cold and cruel world to come back. She wanted this to go on forever.
Elizabeth closed her eyes and wished herself back to that previous occasion when Robert had first kissed her and told her that he loved her. If only they could go back, wipe out the intervening years. If only she could change the way he was, make him become permanently what he had seemed to be then.