Oliver Onions

“ During her illness she had had dreams, and had come to herself at intervals to find Ed or the doctor, Mrs. Hepburn or her aunt, bending over her. These kind, solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse, and then she had gone off into the dreams again. The curious thing had been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life, and the other things—the anxious faces, the details of her dingy bedroom, the thermometer under her tongue—had been the dream. ”

“ I like Littlehampton. It isn't flash like Brighton, and Margate's always so beastly crowded. And do you remember that afternoon by the windmill? I did love you that afternoon, Bessie!"...
He continued to talk, but she was not listening. She was wondering why the words "the sea" were somehow part of it all—the pins and brooches of the Museum, the book on her knees, the dream. She remembered a game of hide-and-seek she had played as a child, in which cries of "Warm, warm, warmer!" had announced the approach to the hidden object. Oh, she was getting warm—positively hot.... ”

“ Ed's steps were heard on the oilclothed portion of the staircase.
"My name—oh, my name!" she cried in an agony of suspense.... "Oh, they will not wait for me! They have lighted the torches—they run up and down the shore with torches—oh, cannot you see me?..."
Suddenly she dashed to the chair on which the litter of linings and tissue-paper lay. She caught up a double handful and crammed them on the fire. They caught and flared. There was a call upon the stairs, and the sound of somebody mounting in haste. ”

“ And to whom?...
"How do you mean, I'm not making an effort, Ed?" she asked slowly, again looking into the fire, where the kettle now made a gnat-like singing.
"Why, an effort to get all right again. To be as you used to be—as, of course, you will be soon."
"As I used to be?" The words came with a little check in her breathing.
"Yes, before all this. To be yourself, you know." ”

“ We ought always to show virtue and vice in their true colours, and if you look at it from that point of view this is just drunkenness. That's rotten; destroys your body and intellect; as I heard a chap say once, it's an insult to the beasts to call it beastly. ”

“ Presently she spoke. "I was looking at some of those things this afternoon, at the Museum."
He was clearing from the table more buckram linings and patterns of paper, numbers of Myra's Journal and The Delineator. Already on his way to the cupboard he had put aside a red-bodiced dressmaker's "shape" of wood and wire. "What things?" he asked.
"Those you were reading about. Greek, aren't they?"
"Oh, the Greek room!... But those people, Bacchus and those, weren't people in the ordinary sense. Gods and goddesses, most of 'em; Bacchus was a god. That's what mythology means. ”

“ Then, as he still mounted, the young man's feet sounded loud on oilcloth; and when he finally paused and knocked at a door it was on a small landing of naked boards beneath the cold gleam of the skylight above the well of the stairs.
"Come in," a girl's voice called. ”

“ They were to be married "as soon as things brightened up a bit," and he was very much in love with her. He watched her head and neck as he continued to lay the table, and then, as he crossed once more to the cupboard, he put his hand lightly in passing on her hair. ”