But he saw only dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.
I foresaw at Florence that her quiet, uneventful childhood must end, and it has ended. I realised dimly enough that she might take some momentous steps. She has taken it. She has learned – you will let me talk freely, as I have begun freely – she has learned what it is to love: the greatest lesson, some people will tell you, that our earthly life provides. She has learned through you.
Nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty – into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life – the real you.
Don’t act. Or act better.
It is well to be remembered with love. It is not so very dreadful to be forgotten entirely. But if we shall resent anything on earth at all, we shall resent the consecration of a deserted room.
The horrible truth, that wicked people are capable of love, stood naked before her, and her moral being was abashed.
And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged. It was otherwise with the failure of the sleeping apparatus. That was a more serious stoppage.
To such a height was he lifted, that without regret he could now have told her that he was her worshipper too. But what was the use of telling her? For all the wonderful things had happened.
The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete – the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art – throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb.
How can we return to Nature when we have never been with her?
It is Fate that I am here,’ persisted George. ‘But you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.
He looked at her as she stood by the pool’s edge. She was got up smart, as she phrased it, and she reminded him of some brilliant flower that has no leaves of its own, but blooms abruptly out of a world of green.
You have each other and all these woods to walk in, so full of beautiful things; and poor Charlotte has only the water turned off and plumbers. You are young, dears, and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old.
His voice moved her deeply, and she wished to remain near him. How dreadful if she really wished to remain near him!
She frowns a little – not in anger, but as a brave child frowns when he is trying not to cry.
Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart: men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls; even men might suffer from unexplained desires, and need help. To one of her upbringing, and of her destination, the weakness of men was a truth unfamiliar, but she had surmised it at Florence, when George threw her photographs into the river Arno.
He had no glimpse of the comradeship after which the girl’s soul yearned.
To ascend, to stretch a hand up the mountainside until a hand catches it, was the end for which he had been born.
He wanted to live now, to win at tennis, to stand for all he was worth in the sun – in the sun which had begun to decline and was shining in her eyes; and he did win.
She might be forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her England.
He simply enfolded her in his manly arms.