Elizabeth Bibesco

“ Jordan?
Ann: If you ever do that again, I shall kill you!
Ninian: What a little vixen you are!
Ann: I mean it.
Ninian: My dear, seriously, you ask a little too much of life. For years you have been worshipped from afar by reverent friends as a saint and a statue. I joined [86] them in my awe of the cold, good woman, beautiful and untouched. I respected my model wife. Then, one fine day, you tell us that you have a lover—you proclaim it with flaming passion. No one believes you. Of course it isn’t true. You are the saint. What you say is only the flaring loyalty of friendship. ”

“ Miss Wilcox would explain and then, "You should be more womanly, dear; men like a womanly woman." And Vera's eyes would sparkle maliciously, for men undoubtedly did like Vera.
I do not know at what moment in life, if ever, we realise that we are neither George Sands nor Juliets. Of course, if we are not beautiful, we recognise early that beauty is nothing. What are features? The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? ”

“ Then she said:
"I want to go for a long walk."
They walked for miles and miles. The mist sprinkled her hair with dew-drops. It looked quite white. Her eyes were deep and brooding and you couldn't catch them.
"Paula," Maurice said, "how remote you are."
"Am I?" she said. And it made her more remote than ever.
He walked desperately, as if each step were an obstacle painfully overcome. She walked with a swaying unconscious rhythm, as if she did not know what she was doing.
She cut off his perfunctory attempts at conversation with a monosyllable. When they got home they were both tired. ”

“ Lady Emily: There is nothing like the country, Ann, nothing like it.
Molyneux: Home, sweet home. When I am asked if I have any relations I always say, I have some Cathcart connections.
Ann (in a tone of desperate weariness) : Everything is going round and round just the same, though the bottom has fallen out of life.
Lord William: My dear, life is a merry-go-round. It never stops for you however many things you drop. The onlooker sees you sitting on the same painted swan, but he can’t see your broken heart unless you show it to him. There is only one rule—not to fall off. ”

“ Poor Miss Wilcox, battling with her conscience when Mr. Simpson's passion was an invention of Vera's to whom old maids and curates were simply stage properties. Vera with her long legs and her laughing eyes and her happy, unimaginative youth—how was she to know that the Simpsons of life stand for romance and mystery and longings unachieved? To some people the impossible is impossible. One fine day they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them. ”

“ Ann: Something obvious and all-embracing.
Philip: So you’ve reached the obvious, have you?
Ann: I have always believed in the obvious.
Philip: What would you call an obvious and all-embracing thing to say?
Ann: I love you.
Philip: Why do women always want to be told that one loves them? They must know whether it is true or not.
Ann: There may be truths that are better left unsaid, but there are no nice truths that are not the better for being repeated.
Philip: Do you call love a nice truth?
Ann: A respectable truth. ”

“ June was perfectly happy. She loved talking to George—George who adored her without knowing that she had genius, only that she had sympathy—had no idea that she was a great woman, only that she was a charming one. He was looking at her with a worried expression.
"June," he said, "you look tired."
"Oh, but I'm not a bit."
He put her feet up and covered them with a shawl.
"I wish you would stop writing," he said. "What good do books do? Health is the only thing that matters."
"Loving is the only thing that matters," she murmured, "loving and being loved." ”

“ Lucy was extremely pleased about all of these things. She was pleased, too, to have married a foreigner, to be sailing away into a new milieu, where she would be surrounded by the strange exciting faces of her husband's friends. It would be delightful to have nothing to do, but make yourself liked, to be automatically disentangled from all of your own complicated, complicating relationships with nothing around you but a new world to conquer. And how thrilled and curious every one must be about her. What sort of a woman had succeeded in catching dear old Tony! ”

“ Her clothes fell into perfection—she walked slowly and calmly with appraising steps. The lace veil was over her face. She did not forget her sunshade, her bag, or her handkerchief. Louis, the waiter, opened the door for her. She sailed out like a gondola on the stage, or Lohengrin's swan. Her movements gave an effect of invisible wheels.
During the afternoon she remained undetectable, which was a tour de force at St. Jean-les-Flots, where the landscape was a successful conspiracy against concealment, and a sunshade could be seen for miles. ”

“ Miss Wilcox gave her advice freely and tied cards on to presents but she felt unaccountably depressed. This, of course, was because dear little Vera whom she had known since a child, whom she had loved as a child, was leaving them and plunging into this strange, unknown adventure. What an uncertain thing marriage, what an elusive thing happiness! At nights she would dream of white satin figures shrouded in white tulle veils, of shy, passionate bridegrooms and shy, radiant brides. Sometimes she would see Vera's face and sometimes her own and often in the morning, she would find her pillow wet. ”

“ I, myself, have always liked Delancey Woburn. To begin with, there is something so endearing about the way he displays his defects, never hiding them or tidying them away or covering them up. There they are for all the world to see, a reassuring shop window full of frank shortcomings. Besides, I never can resist triumphant vitality. Delancey is overflowing with joie de vivre, with curiosity, with a certainty of imminent adventure. ”

“ Sometimes, too, there was an absent-minded dreamer, and villainous business men worked indefatigably in the interests of their own ultimate frustration.
But this, of course, would never do for America where there isn't a market for ne'er-do-wells, frayed carpets inspire no glamour, and dreamers who before the war were despised as harmless, are now damned as dangerous. No, America must have her special line and no one better than Delancey knew how to mix the fragrance of true love with the flavour of Wall Street and serve at the right temperature. ”

“ She was shimmering in silvery blue, her eyes like cloudy star sapphires, her hair like primroses and ashes.
In the motor she leant against him, a discreet gentle pressure. She always gave you a feeling of delicately intertwined reticencies and avowals, a faint New England flavouring which she had never lost.
"I do hope they'll like me," she murmured.
Dinner was a great success. Lucy loved her neighbours and her neighbours loved her, while secretly congratulating themselves on having always been right about Boston (which they had never visited and of which they knew nothing) . ”

“ That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly? Miss Wilcox knew that she was not exactly clever. But after all, what is prettiness and "men don't like clever women." So she consoled herself with the thought that though her manner "permitted no liberties," the warm tenderness of her true nature must be apparent to the really discerning.
Poor Miss Wilcox! She had tried brightness and common-sense, Milton and lawn-tennis, the arch and the aloof. ”

“ Slowly she would pull off her long, clinging gloves and he would hold his breath with joy as she unsheathed her marvelous arms and hands. And then very tenderly, he would lift them to his lips, one by one, laying them down on her lap again where he could see them. And they would smile at one another—a faint smile hers would be, seen as it were, through the veils of her exquisite reticencies. And then because she knew it made him happy, she would take off her hat and release the shimmer of her silvery gold hair, a halo made of sunshine and moonlight, inextricably interwoven. ”

“ He wanted a velvet lawn, a cedar, a rose garden, lavender, a sun dial, iced lemonade and solitude. Or he wanted his own cool apartment, with drawn sunblinds, vases full of flowers, his immense writing table, and a deserted Paris around him.
Women always did to you as they wanted to be done by. That sort of literal interpretation of Christianity showed such a lack of imagination. It was no good telling Marthe that you didn't like the sea, she simply wouldn't believe it. ”

“ That was no doubt the result of the Hotel Bungalow. On the velvet lawn with the cedar, the rose garden, the sun dial and the iced lemonade, he would have been enjoying to the full his usual ironic detachment, but St. Jean-les-Flots would throw any one to romance.
He walked into the dining room. At the far end with her back to him sat the lady. She wore a white coat embroidered with black, a white skirt, a white hat with a white lace veil. On the chair beside her lay a Holland sunshade lined with green. ”

“ And then he would lie sprawling in front of the fire with a half open eye and when you said "Fido" his ears would answer you, taut with response, while his tail would beat the floor in indolent happiness. Is there anything in life so infectiously joyous as a wagging tail? Worry, distress, crossness, all melt at the sight of it—a hypnotic conductor's, baton beating the rhythm of triumphant joie de vivre. ”

“ She got out of bed and her bare feet sank into the warm furry rug; without putting on her slippers she walked across the room, stepping like a child into the puddles of sunshine on the carpet. Leaning out of the window the air pierced through her transparent nightgown—a tingling quality underlying a faint veil of warmth. Everywhere mist and dew lay on the countryside like the bloom on a grape. The gardener's boy walking across the lawn had left his footprints stamped in emerald on the grass. ”

“ He began to whistle, and then—because he did feel most frightfully well—to run.
"Run a mile without being out of breath," he thought complacently, and then—because he hadn't meant to— ("wasn't even thinking of her," he grumbled to Providence) —he found himself outside her door. And in the road there was a motor, a little coral coloured motor. He looked at it in dismay and then he looked at the house. He saw it was lit up and he imagined the room he knew so well. The crimson damask curtains and the creamy walls, the glowing fire and the red roses, the roses he had sent for her. ”

“ He felt like a dog that knows exactly which trick follows what word of command, but as, from force of habit, he invariably became lover-like when he was absent-minded, he stroked her arm with a significant caressing gesture that filled her with joy.
"Are you glad I love you?" she murmured.
"Of course."
"There is an intelligent woman," he thought, "who has had hundreds of men in love with her, making a demand for verbal assurances that can't possibly add anything to her peace of mind. ”

“ The loveliest coat in the world—"fumée de Londres," the salesman had called it, and in fact, it was the colour of the purple-grey smoke that ascends in solid spirals from factory chimneys. There were stripes too of silvery grey chenil which made a play-ground for lights and shadows. In shape it was like an old print of a coachman driving a four-in-hand, long with a flapping cape, and the lining was the colour of the sky when the sun has set. ”

“ And yet it is the way all borderland letters begin, whether the frontier is between acquaintanceship and friendship, or between friendship and love. For there are moments in life when if you can't say "My own Blessed," you can say nothing—omission is the substitute for the absolute. Only with her, formality was a flavouring of intimacy, a curious fragrance like a faint clinging of unseen pot-pourri. ”

“ The wonderful distribution of black and white, the ruffle at the side of his arched neck made by the meeting of two competitive rhythms of hairs, the looseness of his skin, his long lithe legs that would tie themselves into a tangled heap of grace when he lay down.
To see him move was to see motion made concrete—to see him run was to realise that even Pavlova had never quite overcome the obstacle of being a human.
At night he seemed phosphorescent, the dark itself was defeated by his whiteness. ”

“ Gradually the sun began to sink, throwing a riotous tangle of crimson and gold streamers to salute the earth. "They are hauling down the flag of my perfect day," she thought with a stab of poignant sorrow.
The sky became the colour of a primrose stalk and as transparent as green glass. Before touching the horizon it dissolved into violet powder. The colour was being blotted out of everything; one after another the flowers went out like lights; only the white cherry seemed phosphorescent in the gathering darkness. ”