E. M. Delafield

“ Elsie and Morrison went swimming together, and lay on the hot, crowded sands, and dropped behind the others when they all went for walks, and sat with locked hands and her cheek against his shoulder in the stifling, thrilling darkness of the picture theatre, watching together the representation of a love that was never anything but the reflection of their own, the eternal triumph of a Man and a Woman, pale representatives on the screen of Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison. ”

“ The only thing that gives one courage to face the present (saving always that far-reaching Comfort which one knows to be there, but which poor humanity cannot always feel) is a mournful, tender lingering over the past. Nor must you fear that I always weep, dear Owen—there is often absolute rest and joy in dwelling on the past happiness that one knows to be only a shadow and faint forecasting of the Joy that is to come. ”

“ Nothing has much sacredness to you, Julian, has it?"
"I see nothing sacred in the amorous extravagances of your cousin Clarence, certainly."
"And you care very little whether the woman who is charged with the welfare of all those young men and women—sharers, after all, of our common humanity—can give them true, pure-hearted love and service and fellowship," mused Edna. "And yet to me those ideals which you dismiss so lightly seem the most important things in all the world. You see, Julian, love seems to me to matter more than anything in the whole world." ”

“ Alex looked from one to the other with bewilderment. She hardly understood what they were all discussing. From the natural home of her childhood and girlhood, where she had lived as unthinking of ways and means as every other girl of her class and generation, she had passed into the convent world, where all was communal, and the rights of the individual a thing part shunned, part unknown. She could not, at first, grasp that Cedric and Barbara and Violet, perhaps Pam and Archie, too, were all wondering how she would be able to maintain herself on fifty pounds a year. ”

“ Lily confusedly tried to explain.
Miss Melody's brow cleared.
She laughed.
"And are there no times when you are 'nicer' as you call it, than at other times? We're all human, you know, dearie. You mustn't look for perfection."
Lily had often told herself the same thing, and illogically derived reassurance in hearing from somebody else the truism that had failed to impress her from within by any applicability to her especial need.
"I'm not certain that I'm in love with him," she said timidly.
"You mustn't confuse being 'in love' with loving, childie dear," said Miss Melody. ”

“ With that acute clarity of vision that enabled her to analyze certain aspects of her childhood’s world with such astonishing maturity, she once told herself:
“They don’t love me for myself at all. Grandpapa doesn’t love me the least bit—he doesn’t love anybody. And mother loves me because I’m her child, and the aunts love me because I’m father’s child, and they think I’m a comfort to mother.”
She could hardly remember her father, and though at first she had shed tears over his death, Lydia had quickly dried them. ”

“ I’ve known Ford Aviolet for years, and I know him for a bully. Every time he sees that he’s hurt you, and angered you, it gives him a sense of power. And so he’ll go on doing it.”
“He can only touch me through Cecil.”
“He knows that well enough.”
“Why on earth haven’t he and Diana got any children? It’s absurd of them,” declared Rose with vehemence.
“I suppose it’s a disappointment to everyone.”
“Of course it is! They don’t want Cecil to have Squires, and I’m sure I don’t want him to have it. But he’ll have to, if Diana can’t pull herself together.” ”

“ And I thought I knew my child—my merry Valeria, as I have called her from her babyhood—I thought I knew her through and through! She to be dishonourable, she to be heartless, she to attach herself to a godless, brainless, mannerless fellow—and when a man like yourself had received her troth! Owen, it is as though mine own right hand had turned against me.”
The Canon held out a trembling right hand and gazed upon it.
“Where is Captain Cuscaden now, sir?” enquired Quentillian, almost expecting to hear that the object of his solicitude had been bound and cast into outer darkness. ”

“ Madame Clara, all at once, was calling out shrilly in a hard voice, an indescribable blend of horror and excitement in her tone:
“Oh, God—what is it? Look—look, there in the crystal—what have you done? There’s blood, and worse than blood! Oh, my God, what’s this? It’s all over England—you—they’re talking about you——”
Irene Tidmarsh screamed wildly, and Elsie realised that she had sprung to her feet. She herself was utterly unable to move, wave after wave of sick terror surging through her as the high, unrecognisable voice of the clairvoyante screeched and ranted, and then broke horribly. ”

“ I have seen for a long while what it was that God asked of you, Alex, and I believe the time has come when you will see it too. Your last letter, with its cry of loneliness, and the bitter sense of being unwanted, has made me almost sure of it.
"You are not unwanted—you need never be lonely again. 'Leave all things and follow Me!' If you hear that call, which I believe with all my heart to have sounded for you, can you disobey it? Will you not rather, forsaking all things, follow Him, and in so doing, find all things?" ”

“ If there was a lurking sense of apprehension, as of some sacrifice that was to be demanded of her in return for all that she had been given, a grievous dread of inflicting pain, far sharper and stranger than any yet, upon those whom she loved best and from whom she felt already separated as though by an invisible gulf, Frances would not dwell upon it. ”

“ The Divine Spark is always lurking somewhere—although I admit that sometimes, in the less advanced, it is difficult really to hold fast to that belief."
"Oh, but you always do! No one is like you," said Miss Easter, in all good faith. "I don't believe I've ever heard you say an unkind word of anybody."
Lady Rossiter smiled.
"The great thing," she observed gently, "is never to say anything, unless one can say something kind. And it is very strange, Iris dear, how one can nearly always find something that is nice and yet true, to say of everyone." ”

“ Philip kissed Lily once upon the forehead, instead of as usual, two or three times all over her face and said deeply:
"My poor little child! Good-night."
Lily went upstairs in tears, indescribably guilty.
She had been naughty again, and oh! how like God it was, to have arranged things like that. If Vonnie didn't get to bed and to sleep before the earache gained its hold, then they must both suffer through one of those black nights of misery that Lily so dreaded. ”

“ Elsie felt as though she had never lived before. Every morning she came downstairs, her face sunburnt and glowing, but never unbecomingly freckled, her open-necked, short-sleeved blouses and jumpers indefinably smart and well put on, her undependable and essentially variable good looks seeming always to increase.
She was greatly admired in the boarding-house, and Williams for the first time did not appear to resent this. ”

“ The angularity which Lady Isabel so regretted was sharply manifested in the exposed collar-bones just above the open dressing-gown, and in the childishly thin arms and wrists. With an odd, detached shrewdness, she appraised the prominent attributes of her own appearance, its ungraceful immaturity.
As she got slowly into bed, she passed other, moral, attributes, in fleeting review.
Alex believed that one might be loved for one's goodness, if not for one's beauty. But she could not suppose herself to be good. The tradition of the nursery black sheep still clung to her. ”

“ Owen would not sit there, where only the Canon had sat, under the crucifix mounted on the green velvet plaque. He went instead to another, smaller table, in the embrasure of a window, and sat there writing until the morning light streamed in upon him.
Then he laid down the pen, with a sense of the futility of activities that sought to cheat reflection, and let his mind dwell upon that which subconsciously obsessed it.
Canon Morchard had died as he had lived—an optimist. An invincible faith in the ultimate rightness of all things had been his to the end, and perhaps most of all at the end. ”

“ Ruthie was silent, and Lady Rossiter, with a fleeting thought of what an admirable mother she would have made, drew the child gently to her.
"Don't you know that we all contribute, by everything we do and say, to the good and bad in the world? When you are angry, you send out black, ugly thoughts that help to destroy all the good and beautiful harmony that God has put into this lovely world."
Ruthie cast an enquiring glance out of the window at the bleak, grey sky, perfectly bare borders and rather uncompromising Scotch firs which were alone visible at the moment of this lovely world. ”

“ You and she are children; you know nothing of life, you’ve had no experience. How can Hazel judge of what is right or wrong? She’s a child—a child.”
In the vehement repetition of the assertion, it seemed to Rosamund that she found her clue to Bertha Tregaskis’s impotent suffering. She would not, could not, admit in her daughter any claim to the rights of an individual.
Hazel’s judgment, unrecognized by her mother, carried with it no amazement to Rosamund.
Certain faiths, certain scruples and acceptances inborn in Rosamund and Frances, had been the veriest lip-service to the child Hazel always. ”

“ A man is young just as long as he retains his capacity for falling in love. What does it matter if he loves successfully or unsuccessfully? It is the hope, the fears, the despairs, that count—the meetings and partings, the misunderstandings, the beautiful pretence that the most ephemeral of emotions will endure for ever."
"You don't think that love is lasting?"
Lily was smiling a little, but there was disappointment in her heart.
"The Blue Rose is the only one that never fades," said Giulio della Torre. ”

“ She surprised him by a little laugh.
“You see, Owen, I think now that I was quite wrong.”
“Quite wrong,” he echoed gravely.
“It was an odd, muddled sort of time for some years after that. I suppose I was resenting my own decision, and yet trying to buoy myself up all the time by thinking of my own self-abnegation and generosity. It had seemed rather a beautiful thing to do at the time—to sacrifice my own life to my widowed father and my motherless brothers and sisters. At first, I remember thinking that there would be something almost sacred about my everyday life at home.” ”

“ A finite human love will never satisfy that restless heart of yours, Alex. Tell me, have you ever found full satisfaction in the love of any creature yet? Hasn't there always been something lacking—something to grieve and disappoint you?"
Alex looked back. She thought of the stormy loves of her childhood; of Queenie, on whom she had lavished such a passion of devotion; of her vain, thwarted longing to bestow all where the merest modicum would have sufficed; lastly, she thought of Noel Cardew. ”