Louis Couperus

“ How old she is, how old she is! ... Hush, oh, hush: let her grow just a little older; and then it will be over and the Thing will have passed! The last fold of its spectral veil will have vanished; the last leaf on that endless, endless path will have rustled; and, though once a rumour, vaguely, with a dismal moaning, hovered through those trees, it never grew into a voice and an accusation and, from among those trees, no one ever stepped forward with threatening hand that stayed the Thing, the sombre, ghostly Thing, dragging itself along its long road, for years and years and years.... ”

“ He is full of pity, he, the son, who knows and who suspects what he does not know, because he knows the soul of that mother, her soul now dulled and blunted in waiting for the body's death, but her soul also once a soul of passion, of temper, an amorous Creole soul, capable at one moment of forgetting all the world and life itself for a single instant of rapture ... ”

“ And, while he talked about Lot and about health and weather, he saw—as he always saw, when sitting here beside or opposite Mamma—the things that passed and dragged their ghostly veils over the path rustling with dead leaves: the things that passed so slowly, years and years to every yard, until it seemed as though they never would be past and as though he would always continue to see them, ever drawing out their pageant along the age-long path. ”