Elizabeth Bowen

“ She looked at his white face, and laid her head against his shoulder and began to whimper. "Oh, Martin, don't be angry. I am so frightened, I am so frightened."
"Hush!"
"We're not safe and I don't believe we're even good. It can't be right to be so happy when there isn't enough happiness in the world to go round. Suppose we had taken somebody else's happiness, somebody else's life. . . ."
"Pussy, hush, be quiet. I forbid you. You've been dreaming. You've been silly, imagining these horrors. My darling, there's no sin in happiness. You shouldn't play with dreadful thoughts. ”

“ Her ears glowed crimson underneath her hat.
"Association," they sighed, ponderously.
"That's exactly what's the matter," cried Miss Murcheson. "We've got all the nice, fresh, independent, outside things so smeared over with our sentimentalities and prejudices and—associations—that we can't see them anyhow but as part of ourselves. That's how you're—we're missing things and spoiling things for ourselves. You—we don't seem able to discover."
"Life," said Doris sententiously, "is a very big adventure. Of course we all see that." ”

“ Lydia heard Mrs. Tottenham burst open the drawing-room door and cross the threshold with her little customary pounce, as though she hoped to catch somebody unawares. She pictured her looking resentfully round her, and knew that presently she would hear her tweaking at the curtains. During her six weeks of solitude the house had grown very human to Lydia. She felt now as if it were drawing itself together into a nervous rigour, as a man draws himself together in suffering irritation at the entrance of a fussy wife. ”

“ There was a wide loggia, a flight of steps, a terrace on a level with the loggia running along the side of the hill. Cypress trees rose everywhere, breaking up the view. He passed under the windows, climbed the steps and crossed the loggia, not looking to left or right for fear that he might see her suddenly, or even one of her books. The loggia had an air of occupation; it was probable that on any of those tables, or among the cushions, he might see her book, half open, or the long-handled lorgnettes that Majendie had given her in France. ”

“ Now I suppose Doris is to be pitied, isn't she?"
"Oh no, Herbert," cried Cicely quickly.
"She doesn't seem unhappy. In fact, I believe there are very few young ladies Doris would change places with at present. And I think you are wrong, my dear Richard; I consider woman most consistent, if she is taught—and she can be easily taught. She is simpler and more child-like than we are, of course. Her way in life is simple; she is seldom placed in a position where it is necessary for her to think for herself. ”

“ Have you any children?"
"Six," said the tired man.
"I have three," said Marcia. "And a husband. Quite enough, but I am very fond of them all. That is why I am always so glad to get away from them."
He was cutting his lamb with quiet slashing strokes of his knife, and eating quickly and abstractedly, like a man whose habits of life have made food less an indulgence than a necessity. She believed that she was interesting him.
"My idea in life, my particular form of egoism, is a determination not to be swamped. ”

“ She had unlocked a drawer and held a stiff-backed photograph up beneath the light, scrutinising it. Lydia listened to a distant surge of movement in the house beneath her; steps across the oil-cloth, windows shutting, voices cut off by the swinging of a door. She felt, revoltedly, as though Mrs. Tottenham were stepping out of her clothes.
"He says he's hardly changed at all. Seventeen years—they go past you like a flash, he says, when you're working."
"Seventeen years," said Lydia deliberately, "are bound to make a difference to a woman. ”

“ The room was dark with rain, and they heard the drip and rustle of leaves in the drinking garden. Through the open window the warm, wet air blew in on them, and a shimmer of rain was visible against the trees beyond.
"I never meant———" began Penelope.
"I beg your pardon," said Maurice stiffly. "I suppose I am becoming quite insufferable. I have been making perfectly unjustifiable demands on your sympathy and patience and—imagination. I am an egotistical brute, I daresay. ”

“ In the evenings he knew that Richard and she read poetry together, and not improbably kissed; through the folding doors he could hear their cold supper being laid out in the dining-room. How could he have guessed that something inside her had been clamouring for these preposterous evenings all her life? She had seemed so contented, sewing by the lamp while he smoked and read the paper and Poor Mother dozed.
It was wasting pity to be sorry for them; he turned from his anæmic relations to review his long perspective of upholstered happiness with Doris. ”

“ I know nothing about it; is it poignant?" asked Gilda. "Laura, we will go next time you're here."
"You might go about eight weeks hence," suggested Archie disinterestedly. "When I shall be—there, you know. It would be rather amusing. And I say, suppose you always write on Sunday evenings—no, of course you couldn't; the house is always full of people. It's awfully funny to think of those bells going, and all these chairs and sofas here, and people in them, and not me. It's funny to think of everywhere going on without one, and still going on if one never came back." ”

“ Roche slowly. "I don't think it's very personal. After all, it's only the husk of one—unavoidably there. But one's clothes are part of what one has got to say. Eve was much more herself when she began putting flowers in her hair than when she sat about in just—no fig-leaves. And she was much more herself than ever when she had got the fig-leaves on, and you and I are much more ourselves than she was."
"Then do you think covering oneself up is being real?" asked Laura. She entered the conversation with heavy, serious grace, as she would have entered a room.
"I don't know," said Gilda Roche. ”

“ When they returned to the drawing-room the fire had burnt down a little. Martin piled on wood, then sat back in the shadow watching Pussy, who, with a reading lamp at her elbow, had begun to sew. He never read these evenings; a table of bric-à-brac had been pushed up against the doors of the bookcase with the gilt-bound classics and encyclopædias which had beguiled his evenings other years. Books, after all, were musty things, and all the book-learning in the world didn't make him more valuable to Pussy, whose eye wandered when he spoke to her of dynasties or carnivorous plants. ”

“ When the meals for the day were ordered and her breakfast half-surreptitiously eaten with the letter tucked inside the tea-cosy, she went upstairs to her room and tried on the hat she had worn in London, folding the side-flaps of the mirror round her so that she could see her profile. She leant forward gazing at a point in space represented by the prismatic stopper of a scent bottle. With a long, slow breath she went slowly through the action of drawing off a glove.
"Living," she said aloud, "for years and years on the defensive." ”

“ She folded paper into a spill and lighted a long row of candles, ranged in motley candlesticks along the chimney-piece.
"Tut-tut," said Herbert. "We shall find it very difficult to work. How tiresome these people are."
"Yes," said Cicely.
He resented her tone of detachment. She had blown out her spill and stood twisting the charred ends of paper between her fingers. Long streaks of hair had loosened themselves and hung across her forehead, her cheeks were smeared with dust, her tall thin figure drooped with weariness, but her eyes were shining in the firelight with a strange excitement. ”

“ The jewels flashed in Marcia's rings as she laid down knife and fork, and, drumming with her fingers on the table, proceeded to expatiate on egoists.
"Don't think I'm going to be clever," she implored him, "and talk like a woman in a Meredith book. Well, quite baldly to begin with, one acknowledges that one puts oneself first, doesn't one? There may be other people, but it's ourselves that matter." ”

“ But what a curious coincidence: she had set her class to write an essay upon Daffodils! "You shall judge; I'll read them all out loud. They will amuse you." She dipped her pen in the red-ink pot with an anticipatory titter.
With a creak of wheels a young woman went by slowly, wheeling a perambulator. She leant heavily on the handle-bar, tilting the perambulator on its two back wheels, and staring up, wide-mouthed, at the windows.
"How nice to be so much interested," thought Miss Murcheson, pressing open the first exercise-book. "But I'm sure it can't be a good thing for the baby." ”

“ My egoism is nothing if not blatant and unblushing.
"Now you go on!" she said encouragingly, helping herself to salad. "Tell me about your selfishness, then I'll define how it's different from mine."
He did not appear inspired.
"Yours is a much better kind," she supplemented. "Finer. You have given up everything but the thing that won't be given up. In fact, there's nothing wrong in your sort of egoism. It's only your self-consciousness that brings it to life at all. ”

“ She grasped eagerly at the phrase. "Healing and invigoration, yes, that's what I mean. It isn't anything to do with love or friendship. When I was younger I thought that loving people was meant to help one; it led me—oh, so wrong. Loving is only giving, isn't it, just a sort of luxury, like giving this window. It doesn't do you any good, or the person either. But people like ———"—she named a notorious lady—"I can't tell you how she's helped me. She's so brave, nobody seems too bad for her. She never despises you. And I've another friend who is a spiritualist." ”

“ Russel brightly; "you won't mind, will you, girls?" Her appeal included Aunt Willoughby, who made no response. "You see, we couldn't hardly rush them over their breakfasts, could we?"
This was "home comforts." This was one of the privileges for which Rossiter paid her twenty-four shillings a week. Being sat round and watched while you were eating. Not being rushed. He had a vision of a "rushed breakfast," of whirling endlessly through space while one snapped at a sausage with little furtive bites; of munching bread and marmalade with the wind of one's velocity whistling through one's teeth. ”

“ The stranger put his head and shoulders through the window. Marcia studied his narrow back in the shabby tweed jacket, his thinning hair and the frayed edges of his collar. One hand gripped the back of his chair; she thought, "How terrible to see a man who isn't sunburnt." She listened to his muffled conversation with the waitress, and pushed her plate away, deploring the oiliness of the salad. ”

“ He felt that two springs were broken in the sofa, and pressed the cushions carefully with his hand to discover the extent of further damage.
"Damn it all," he said querulously, "I can't get used to another woman at my time of life!"
"Herbert, you've got no imagination." Her tone was amused, dispassionate. She was suddenly superior, radiant and aloof; his no longer, another man's possession.
Her speech chimed in with his thoughts.
"Every man's got to have one woman!"
Taking one of the candles, she turned and left the room. ”

“ It was quite true; she left books of poetry about and Harold never glanced at them; she sat for hours gazing at the fire or (as Charles said) out of the window and Harold never asked her what she was thinking about; when she was playing with the children she would break off suddenly and turn away her face and sigh, and Harold never asked her what was the matter. He would go away for days and leave her alone in the house with nobody to talk to but the children and the servants and the people next door. But of course solitude was her only escape and solace; she added this as a postscript. ”

“ Darlingest had spent the morning doing those deathly primroses, and then taken up her grey gloves and gone out, at the end of the afternoon, just when she knew her little girl would be coming in. A quarter-past four. It was unforgivable of Darlingest: she had been a mother for more than twelve years, the mother exclusively of Rosalind, and still, it seemed, she knew no better than to do a thing like that. Other people's mothers had terrible little babies: they ran quickly in and out to go to them, or they had smoky husbands who came in and sat, with big feet. ”

“ His lips were sealed still, and for ever, by fear of her and shame for his dead loyalty to Howard. The generosity of love had turned to bitterness within him, and he was silent from no fear to cause her pain.
"Beautiful," he said, when they reached the pergola and could look down on lake and garden through the clustered roses.
"Will you be long at Varenna?"
"I don't expect so, no. Some friends want me to join them on Lake Maggiore, and I think of going on to-morrow afternoon."
"That will be better," she said slowly. "It is lonely seeing places alone—they hardly seem worth while." ”

“ Rossiter, though they have had a bit of a start this morning!"
Did he really bolt his food and make, perhaps, disgusting noises with his mouth?
"That's why I always say we'd rather breakfast early—all of us, even the ones who haven't necessarily got to rush. It's so much homier, one feels, than rough-and-tumble modern breakfast nowadays. Everybody sort of rushing in and scrambling and snatching and making grabs at things off a table at the side. There's nothing so homely," said Mrs. Russel with conscious brilliance, "as a comfortable sit-down family to breakfast." ”

“ Mrs. Tottenham was conscious of her glance. "Shows rather, doesn't it?" she queried diffidently, and rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand till the red was smeared out over her cheeks.
"One looks so washy after a journey. Just a touch of colour—one wouldn't notice it, hardly, if it wasn't for the glare." Her muttered extenuations were not addressed to Lydia.
They heard the tea-tray rattling through the hall. Lydia turned the light out, and they prepared to descend. Mrs. Tottenham pawed her in the twilight. "You needn't mention to Mr. Tottenham I've opened any of my letters. ”