Under the Net

by Iris Murdoch

‘You wouldn’t be so careless of it if you’d ever lacked the love of others,’

I was for letting the usual spell bind me; life has so few moments which announce themselves as sacred.

The Ward Matron was so august a person, so elderly and austere and with such a high notion of her own dignity, that the possibility of certain frictions was removed simply by the social distance which lay between us. My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.

inveigling

of having conceived things as I pleased and not as they were.