I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.
Well, now you can see for yourself that she was delicate”, said Davey triumphantly. “She’s dead. It killed her. Doesn’t that show you? I do wish I could make you Radletts understand that there is no such thing as imaginary illness. Nobody who is quite well could possibly be bothered to do all the things that I, for instance, am obliged to, in order to keep my wretched frame on its feet.
She belonged to that rare and objectionable species, the intellectual snob devoid of intellect.
Isn’t it lovely to be lovely me!
Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings.
Time passed, and a morning came when Grace woke up at Yeotown feeling, if not quite happy, at least without a stifling blanket of unhappiness. This blanket had hitherto weighed upon her like something physical, so that there had been days when she had hardly been able to rise from under it and get out of bed.
Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual,” said Madame Rocher, “he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn’t been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.
She had all the sentimentality of her generation, and this sentimentality, growing like a green moss over her spirit, helped to conceal its texture of stone, if not from others, at any rate from herself. She was convinced that she was a woman of profound sensibility.
Nonsense. And don’t you go marrying just anybody, for love,” she said. “Remember that love cannot last; it never, never does; but if you marry all this it’s for your life. One day, don’t forget, you’ll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can’t have, say, a pair of diamond earrings. A woman of my age needs diamonds near her face, to give a sparkle.
I think Linda realized there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected.
I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.
It is unfair’ was a perpetual cry of the Radletts when young. The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.
No woman really minds hearing of the past affairs of her lover, it is the future alone that has the power to terrify.
Friendship is something to be built up carefully, by people with leisure, it is an art, nature does not enter into it.
Wrapped in her mink bedspread, she would lie all day with her puppy beside her, reading fairy stories.
These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon honey-dew, and that is an incomparable diet.
What did I tell you, Fanny, about air-raids not killing people. Here we are, right as rain. My bed simply went through the floor, Plon-plon and I went on it, most comfortable.
All right, keep your hair on,′ said the old singer, taking his off and adjusting a curl. ‘Have another drink’.
Sophia feared that divorce, re-marriage, and subsequent poverty would not bring out the best in her character.
Air raid warning Yellow’, she had experienced the unhealthy glow of excitement that she might easily become a air raid addict, or take to air raids in the same way that people do to drugs, and for much the same reason.
Oh what a pity it happens to be Davey’s day for getting drunk. I long to tell him, he will be so much interested.