Phyllis Bottome

“ Geoffrey joined her. A catch had just come in; the bay was filled with the swooping, swirling lightning of the sea-gulls' wings, and the little fisher houses, crowding down to the brim of the bay. their roofs aslant, and silvery with rain-washed slate, seemed on the verge of joining in the flight.
"Curious I had n't noticed it before," Geoffrey murmured. "They do shape like wings; I must paint them. I 'll take a gray day; it 'll bring it out more. Thank you for the idea, Miss Fanny." ”

“ They remained behind with Fanny, and Fanny never looked at him like that again. She settled with the Furies.
She appeared in the studio toward supper-time with a basket packed with mushrooms, a lettuce, and a cream cheese. She stewed the mushrooms in milk, mixed the salad, and laid the table, while Geoffrey, pretending not to notice her, wrote to Emily. For once Emily did not notice something wrong, and yet there was something wrong in Geoffrey's letter. It was the defensive letter of a good man in a bad temper. ”

“ Hang it all! you don't look the kind of person,—after all, I 've seen lots of them,—who goes under or stays under. I can't make you out, Fanny."
They were sitting on the gray rocks, between the violent bushes of flowering gorse. The sea lay far below them, a long, blue line. Geoffrey had been painting Fanny in a circle of gray rocks. She wore a blue linen frock of Emily's, the shade of a gentian. The light had altered too much for Geoffrey to go on painting. ”

“ Ives separately. Geoffrey spent the journey in smoking interminable cigarettes and thinking of Emily. Fanny spent it in not thinking at all. She wondered idly from time to time what would happen if she made eyes at a young man in the opposite corner. Ultimately they went into the dining-car together, and he said grace before his lunch. Still, Fanny was not sure how much that would have helped him. She had known piety crumble more easily than savoir-faire. Savoir-faire was more elastic. However, she was n't going to try, of course.
Geoffrey took a studio the day before Fanny arrived. ”

“ It only upsets them. What they like to think is we 're just weak or wicked. 'Unfortunate sisters,' Miss Emilv calls us; love and the world well lost, that's their idea. It's lost all right, and I dare say it's love sometimes; but with nine out of ten of us it is n't love. ”

“ Henry promised me a good lot of money for Jimmy's school and Hetty's back and the boots, and he gave it to me, too, directly we got to London, and father sent the money back to me, with, written on a paper round the check, 'The wages of sin is death.' That was all right, of course; but I did n't have eight children, and spend on cider what ought to have kept them, did I?
"When you come to think of it, it must be a lot easier to slop out a text than keep it. You can't blame religious people that they prefer slopping out; only it's apt to put you off religion. ”