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I HAVE NEVER BEGUN a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it.
It is very difficult to know people and I don’t think one can ever really know any but one’s own countrymen.
Anyhow he had enough to live in what he considered was the proper style for a gentleman without trying to earn money, and the method by which he had done so in the past was a matter which, unless you wished to lose his acquaintance, you were wise not to refer to. Thus relieved of material cares he gave himself over to the ruling passion of his life, which was social relationships.
He was always prepared to make himself useful, and there was nothing, however tiresome, that you asked him to do for you that he would not do with pleasure.
In the company of such as these he felt that he lived in a spacious and gallant past.
It had a homely, lived-in air, and you felt that that incredible jumble had a significance.
We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.
When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.”
And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.”
I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life.
She radiated warmth so that you thought that if you held out your hands you could feel its comfort.
For one thing, as any writer will tell you, people do tell a writer things that they don’t tell others.
It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called but few are chosen.”
For a while we were silent. A chill went down my spine as it strangely does when I am confronted with deep and genuine human emotion. I find it terrible and rather awe-inspiring.
“Do you love him very much?” I asked at last. “I don’t know. I’m impatient with him. I’m exasperated with him. I keep longing for him.”
“You know, when one’s in love,” I said, “and things go all wrong, one’s terribly unhappy and one thinks one won’t ever get over it. But you’ll be astounded to learn what the sea will do.” “What do you mean?” she smiled. “Well, love isn’t a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You’ll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable.”
Most people when they’re in love invent every kind of reason to persuade themselves that it’s only sensible to do what they want. I suppose that’s why there are so many disastrous marriages. They are like those who put their affairs in the hands of someone they know to be a crook, but who happens to be an intimate friend because, unwilling to believe that a crook is a crook first and a friend afterward, they are convinced that, however dishonest he may be with others, he won’t be so with them.
It was fantastic to hear that great hulking bum, who’d been thrown out of his own world, that sardonic, bitter down-and-out, speaking of the ultimate reality of things and the blessedness of union with God.
he said that the world isn’t a creation, for out of nothing nothing comes; but a manifestation of the eternal nature; well, that was all right, but then he added that evil is as direct a manifestation of the divine as good.
His house when finished was fresh and gay, unusual, and simple with that simplicity that you knew could only have been achieved at great expense.
I never ceased to admire the way in which, while he bowed with courtly grace to those exalted personages, he managed to maintain the independent demeanor of the citizen of a country where all men are said to be born equal.
He thought he was magnanimous; he was only vain.
Knowing that nothing is easier than to bear other people’s calamities with fortitude, I thought that Elliott, richer now than he had ever been in his life, was perhaps hardly entitled to be severe.
He wrote with sincerity and emotion. I should never have thought him capable of expressing himself with such dignity, real feeling, and simplicity, had I not long known that notwithstanding his snobbishness and his absurd affectations Elliott was a kindly, affectionate, and honest man.
Who could deny that Elliott, that arch-snob, was also the kindest, most considerate and generous of men?
I did not hesitate to put the question that came to the tip of my tongue. After all, if you want to know something the best way is to ask.
I asked myself if she thought she’d answered my question. I changed the conversation.
He listened to me with his eyes fixed on my face in a meditative, unblinking gaze that suggested to me, I don’t know why, that he was listening to me not with his ears, but with some inner more sensitive organ of hearing. It was queer and not very comfortable.
I felt that there was something within him, I don’t know whether to call it awareness or a sensibility or a force, that remained strangely aloof.
She had lost him before, and on seeing him again, taking him for the old Larry, she had a feeling that, however altered the circumstances, he was still hers; and now, as though she had sought to catch a sunbeam in her hand and it slipped through her fingers as she grasped it, she was a trifle dismayed.
“I suppose I know what you mean. One’s having fun, and one thinks he’s just like one of us, just like everybody else, and then suddenly you have the feeling that he’s escaped you like a smoke ring that you try to catch in your hands. What do you think it can be that makes him so queer?”
“Don’t you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”
You’re their ideal of all that’s graceful and beautiful and wonderful. But they’re not cozy and at their ease with you as they are with Gray. They worship you, that’s true; but they love him.”
I think it’s all stuff and nonsense to say that there can be love without passion; when people say love can endure after passion is dead they’re talking of something else, affection, kindliness, community of taste and interest, and habit. Especially habit.
Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive.
It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one’s life, that one’s brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one’s expended all one’s tenderness, poured out all the riches of one’s soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one’s dreams, who wasn’t worth a stick of chewing gum.”
I have never believed very much in women’s intuition; it fits in too neatly with what they want to believe to persuade me that it is trustworthy;
“Don’t try to paint like a man, my dear,” he said. “Paint like a woman. Don’t aim to be strong; be satisfied to charm. And be honest. In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.”
Even now I can’t read some of the letters of Madame de Sévigné that he read to me without hearing his lovely voice and without seeing the river flowing so quietly and the poplars on the opposite bank, and sometimes I can’t go on, it gives me such a pain in my heart. I know now that those were the happiest weeks I ever spent in my life. That man, he’s an angel of sweetness.”
My instinct told me I’d be silly to fall in love with him, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard.”
“You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth. It came as such a surprise to most people that they thought I was being funny.”
“Well, Larry is, I think, the only person I’ve ever met who’s completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We’re not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.”
I thought I should be a fool to allow work to interfere with a delight in the passing moment that I might never enjoy again so fully.
Though not amusing, he was so good-humored and so easily pleased that it was impossible not to like him. He was the kind of man with whom one would have hesitated to pass a lonely evening, but with whom one might cheerfully have looked forward to spending six months.
But a normal person recovers from a thing like that. If she went to pieces it’s because there was a rotten streak in her. She was naturally unbalanced; even her love for Bob was exaggerated. If she’d had character she’d have been able to make something of life.”
She’d lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn’t put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell.
“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”
I wondered if he realized what a lamentable confession he was then making. I had not the heart to laugh at Elliott any more; he seemed to me a profoundly pathetic object. Society was what he lived for, a party was the breath of his nostrils, not to be asked to one was an affront, to be alone was a mortification; and, an old man now, he was desperately afraid.
He would have stared at you with frank amazement had you suggested to him that his existence was futile. He would have thought you distressingly plebian.
Quite a number of highly respected citizens get drunk and have a liking for rough trade. They’re bad habits, like biting one’s nails, but I don’t know that they’re worse than that. I call a person bad who lies and cheats and is unkind.”
