The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

‘You’ve got foolishness and wickedness somehow mixed up.’

Abandoning a lifelong belief that to name happiness is to dissipate it, she smiled at herself in the mirror and told herself silently, You are happy, Eleanor, you have finally been given a part of your measure of happiness. Looking away from her own face in the mirror, she thought blindly, Journeys end in lovers meeting, lovers meeting.

Suddenly, without reason, laughter trembled inside Eleanor; she wanted to run to the head of the table and hug the doctor, she wanted to reel, chanting, across the stretches of the lawn, she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am here, she thought. She shut her eyes quickly in delight and then said demurely to the doctor, ‘And what do we do today?’

All I want is to be cherished, she thought, and here I am talking gibberish with a selfish man.

‘Theo,’ Eleanor said awkwardly, ‘I’m no good at talking to people and saying things.’ Theodora laughed. ‘What are you good at?’ she demanded. ‘Running away?’