The Last September

She thought she need not worry about her youth; it wasted itself spontaneously, like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room.

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room.

A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.

If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.

Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, and abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast.

All the way up the house the windows were open; light came diagonally from window to window through corner rooms. Two storeys up, she could have heard a curtain rustle, but the mansion piled itself up in silence over the Montmorencys' voices.

What is it exactly,” she asked, “that they mean by freedom? What does it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?

She had this one limitation, his darling Lois; she couldn’t look on her own eyes, had no idea what she was, resented almost his attention being so constantly fixed on something she wasn’t aware of.