Christopher Morley

“ Dunham looked off down the valley, where great areas of shadow were moving, subtending the silver floes of wind-drifting cloud.
"Put it this way," he said. "It's the shadow that life casts on eternity."
"Or maybe the other way round. The shadow eternity casts upon life?"
They walked on round the hillside, skirting the patch of woodland that hid the house from the road. ”

“ There are days, like to-day, when the very harmony of air and sunlight terrifies me. Days so excellent they trouble the heart. They make you suspect that life is only a queer dream, one of those nightmares in which your limbs are paralyzed in the face of sure disaster. ”

“ They gazed about them with a sort of vacant satisfaction.
"My mind feels like that old house there," said Dunham. "A dusty shell, vacant, lifeless, and yet somehow aware that it once was alive. Just a foggy memory that I was, forty-eight hours ago, a hustling business man tied down by telephone wires."
"Yes, you're tired," said Grimes. "Everyone's tired. The world itself is tired. I'm glad it is. If it gets tired enough, desperate enough, it'll come to its senses. ”

“ Dunham followed the old track among the bushes. There, quietly rotting in a flicker of sun and shadow, lay the cast-off rubbish of a vanished household—broken china, rusted cans, a skeleton umbrella. Among the litter, broken and badly twisted, lay an old velocipede.
After breakfast, while Grimes was packing up their kit, Dunham slipped into the house. In the morning light, that broke in golden webs across the dusty rooms, the place was only faintly sad. In the cupboard under the stairs, far at the back, he found a child's sailor cap. ”

“ There was a throbbing down the road, and round the curve that embraced the hillside Hashed a big touring-car, lifting a swirl of powdery dust. They watched it disappear, with the small pitiful smile of two ghosts, just stepped off earth and reviewing the quaint futilities from which they were now released.
"These arcadian spots aren't always what one imagines," Dunham said. "It doesn't do to live too close to nature, I've always noticed, it's the loveliest places that lie vacant. That's just it—they're too lovely. People get frightened. ”