The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

Eleanor almost giggled, thinking of herself calling, “Oh, Mrs. Dudley, I need your help in the dark,” and then she shivered.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.

Eleanor thought, looking down at her hands which were badly shaped. We could have afforded a laundress, she thought; it wasn’t fair. My hands are awful.

“No one ever loved me because I belonged,” he said. “I suppose you can understand that?” No, she thought, you are not going to catch me so cheaply; I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings; this man is a parrot. I will tell him that I can never understand such a thing, that maudlin self-pity does not move directly at my heart; I will not make a fool of myself by encouraging him to mock me. “I understand, yes,” she said.

Fear and guilt are sisters; Theodora caught her on the lawn. Silent, angry, hurt, they left Hill House side by side, walking together, each sorry for the other. A person angry, or laughing, or terrified, or jealous, will go stubbornly on into extremes of behavior impossible at another time;

Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question—as “Do you love me?”—could never be answered or forgotten.