Why do gentlemen’s voices carry so clearly, when women’s are so easily stifled?
Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.
I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart—so hard, it hurt me.
But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, ‘She’s nothing to you’, the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.
She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.
Don’t you be thinking,’ she says, ‘on things that are done and can’t be changed. All right, dear girl? You think of the time to come.
She said, ‘It is filled with all the words for how I want you.
For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.
The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real.
She said that that was the disadvantage of bringing creatures into the house: one grew used to them, and then, one had the upset of their loss.
And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.
She closed her eyes and let the rain fall on her face, and after another second, I could not have said what were raindrops, and what tears.
With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.
But the more I think it, the more I want her, the more my desire rises and swells.
It made me giddy. It made me blush, worse than before. It was like liquor. It made me drunk. I drew away. When her breath came now upon my mouth, it came very cold. My mouth was wet, from hers. I said, in a whisper,’Do you feel it?
It was heavy, and I staggered when I lifted it; but it was strangely satifying to have a real burden upon my shoulders – a kind of counterweight to my terrible heaviness of heart.
But it’s the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world—ain’t it, though!
I’m sorry you aren’t as brave as you thought you were. But don’t punish me because of it.
In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow – and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.
Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her.
But my thoughts were more like poisons. I had so many, they made me sick.
The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!
I shivered again, remembering. I put the tip of one finger to my tongue. It tasted sharp—like vinegar, like blood.Like money.
She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And no-one would love her, ever again.
Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice – a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.