Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“ Amabel murmured. She looked into the fire, near tears, indeed, in her bewilderment; and Sir Hugh looked at her, looked hard and carefully, at her noble figure, her white hands, the gold and white of her leaning head. He looked, as if measuring the degree of his own good fortune.
"You are so lovely," he then said quietly.
She blushed like a girl.
"You are the most beautiful woman I know," said Sir Hugh. "There is no one like you," He put his hand out to hers, and, helplessly, she yielded it. "Amabel, do you know, I have fallen in love with you." ”

“ Forrester's drawing-room, and her pleasure in seeing him was neither less frank nor more intimate.
She wore a broad hat of sun-burnt straw and a white serge coat and skirt that looked as if they had shrunk in frequent washings. Her white blouse had the little frills at neck and wrists and around her throat was the gold locket on its black ribbon. Her eyes, when she turned them on him and smiled, seemed to open distances like the limitlessness of the moorland. Her tawny skin and shining golden hair were like the gorse and primroses and she in her serenity and gladness like the day personified. ”

“ Felkin's departure; all the blurred medley of the times when she had talked to Jack and Mary and her mother had listened. A dimness, a haze, was over all, and she only escaped it, broke through it, when, fighting her way out to her own secure air and sunlight, she told herself,—as, at all events, the nearest truth to hand,—that it was about Jack, over him, that the web had been spun: the web of a smile that claimed nothing, yet that chained men; the web of a vague, sweet silence, that judged nothing, yet softly blighted, through its own indifference, all other people's enthusiasms. ”

“ Within there was the serenity, the flicker of firelight, Madame Vicaud, and her silent harp.
She turned her head with her smile of welcome, and, as he drew a chair near hers, lightly touched a harp-string. The throb of the vibrant note echoed in the young man’s heart. For the first time, after a winter of patient waiting, he was alone with his mystery, alone with the woman he adored; for that he adored this cold, sweet, faded woman, with her fragrant life blossoming on its black background, was as much a fact of his existence as that he had seen her photograph on that distant sunny day. ”

“ Waterlow had transplanted her discipline to London.
But, no; like a soft gush of sunlight, like bells and clear, running water, the first room greeted him in a medley of untraceable associations. It was the first room, with the delicate cane-seated chairs and settees, the red lacquer and the glass, all looking lovelier than ever against the paneled white, all brighter, sweeter, happier than in the rather dim room on the ground floor in Chislebridge. And touches of green, like tiny flakes of vivid flame, went through it in the leaves of the white azaleas that filled the jars and vases. ”

“ Her white hair was smoothed thickly under the transparent cambrics of an exquisite cap, and framed the sweetness of a faded face, in profile like Camelia’s. Camelia’s eyes were her father’s, and her smile; Lady Paton’s eyes were round like a child’s, and her smile half-frightened, half-explanatory. With all the gentlewoman’s mild dignity, her look was timid, as though it besought indulgence for a lifelong sense of insignificance, a look that aroused in Perior his grimmest scorn for a world in which such flower-like moral loveliness is inevitably victimized by garish egotisms. ”

“ He knew the rules of the game and with him Alice was safe from any open pillory. People would never do more than whisper.
A bitter daylight flooded for Gavan that sweet, false dawn, and once again the cruelty, the caprice at the heart of all things were revealed to him. He knew the flame of impotent remorse. He had tossed the miserable child to this fate, and though remorse, like all else, was meaningless, he loathed himself for his futile, empty magnanimity.
She had seen his eyes upon her as she rode. She sent for him, and, alone with him, the glitter, the hardness, broke to dreadful despair. ”

“ What they meant for his mind was the unbridged chasm between nature and the sufferings of man. Only when one ceased to be a man, ceased to remember and to think, could such a day, such sights, bring the unreasoning joy.
Walking back, he saw, as he approached the house, that Mrs. Baldwin was standing at the garden-gate, and, bare-headed, in the linen dress of pale lavender, she made him at once think of the crocuses, or they of her. Their gentleness was like her, their simplicity, and something, too,—for he felt this in her,—of unearthliness. ”

“ In her eyes, her smiles, the empty caressing of her voice, was there not already the most profound indifference? And all the forces of Christina's nature rose in rebellion. She felt the rebellion like the onslaught of angels of light against powers of darkness; it was the ideal doing battle with some primal, instinctive force. She must fight for Milly and for herself. For she, too, had her claim. She measured herself beside Dick Quentyn, her needs beside his. His life was cheerful, contented, complete; hers without Milly would be a warped, a meaningless, a broken life. ”

“ How unlike Lydia to wear those roses. And was it Lydia who stood there? A mental perplexity mingled with the physical pain and spoiled his peace. It was not Lydia’s, that white face in the coffin with wet ivy behind it. What suffering was this that beat upon his heart? The music had faded all away and he saw faces everywhere, dying faces; and blood and terrible mutilations. All the suffering of the war, worse, far worse than the mere claws and fangs that tore at him. Dying boys choked out their breaths in agonies of conscious loneliness, yearning for faces they would never see again. ”

“ Gavan glanced out at the rushing darkness on either side. It was like the sliding of a curtain before the first act of a drama. His cigar was done and he did not light another. His eyes on that darkness that passed and passed, he gave himself up to the long vision of the nearer years. Through them went always the link with childhood, the haunting phrase that sounded in every scene—that fear of life, that deep dread of its evil and its pain that he had tried to hide from Eppie, but that, together, they had glanced at. ”

“ A vague, absurdly alarming sense of presage grew upon him as his eyes went from this face to Imogen's—so still, so cold, so unanswering, lightened, as if from a vail of heavy cloud, by that stealthy, baleful, illuminating glance. In Imogen's whole bearing he read renouncement, but renouncement, in her hand, would assuredly prove a scourge for her mother's shoulders. For the time that they must be together, she and her mother, her sense of her own proved rightness would be relentless, as inflexible as and as relentless as her sense of bitter wrong. ”

“ Men had loved Helen before, yet, she felt it, no man had loved her as Franklin did. She could not have analysed the difference between his love and that of other men, yet she felt it dimly. Franklin stood and gazed; but it was not at charm or beauty that he gazed; whether he was really deeply aware of them she could not tell; the only words she could find with which to express her predicament and its cause sounded silly to her, but she could find no others. Franklin was gazing at her soul. ”

“ But in the morning the grey sheet dropped once more between her and the outer world, and the sound of the steady drip and beat was like an outer echo to her inner wretchedness.
It was on the fourth day that wretchedness turned to bitter restlessness, and that to a sudden resolve. Not to write, not even to say she forgave, might make him think that her heart was still hardened against him. Her fear had blunted her imagination. Clearly now she saw, and with an anguish in the vision, that Augustine must be suffering too. Clearly she heard the love in his parting words. ”

“ She felt herself to be older than Lady Mary as she watched her and listened to her; she felt herself wiser. Life required far more circumspection than Lady Mary imagined. If Lady Mary was circumspect it was subconsciously, for candour was her aim. But so one might mislead oneself and other people. And as all these thoughts went through Alix’s mind, while Lady Mary laid out her pretty cards, there floated across it a memory of the shrewd old face of a priest to whom she had once gone for the yearly, the reluctant, confession. ”

“ He had left, as it were, no emptiness behind him.
She had lifted her head and looked round the garden, trying, in the physical fact of absence, to summon the spiritual void. How he had planned, dug, planted it; pruned his fruit trees; placed his anemones in leaf-mould, his bulbs on sand. She saw his kindly, handsome figure everywhere; his brown cheek, good grey eye, and close-cropped, tawny hair. A manly, simple creature; the salt of the earth, as honest as the day—oh, she saw it all; she had said it to herself a hundred times; and there had, indeed, been nothing one could say against Charlie. ”

“ It was altogether like an Embarquement pour Cythère, Maurice thought, with the one little corner of his mind that could still see enhancing similes. They were setting sail in the golden haze—what need to ask where bound—to something happy it must be. And, flushed like a wild-rose from his kiss, Felicia felt, too, that swift sailing away into a sunny mist, felt, like the soft speeding through shining waves, relief at the leaving of hostile shores, delightful ease, the soothing of the ruffled frightened heart, afraid of life and of its own loneliness. Life, then, was good, since he loved her. ”