More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
they called The Inn the Whorehouse Inn because a mad, praying whore had died there, and in Herndon and Beech many good women — doctor though her husband might be — felt free to cut Rose dead on the streets. And truly her beauty — useless and careless as a butterfly — was hard to forgive, and so was her quick smile and proud carriage.
And thus do we excuse our failures, by admitting them.
To be kind is to try to remove obstacles in the way of those who love or need you.’
And that was that! But wonderful to watch. It was more than watching a man wind a fool clock. It was watching a man seeing to it that things went on as they had, and always would.
you do wonder sometimes if people are what you think they are, or if you only think that they are and they are what they are and not what you think.
But of course that wouldn’t do, because there had never been any spoken sentiment between them and never would be. Their relationship was not one based on words.
Small silence, and the wind under the door. ‘I was talking with Mrs Gordon.’ ‘Yeah. She cried on your shoulder, didn’t she.’ ‘So she did.’ She! She could mean the end of the world, as Phil knew it.
In other words, he knew all there was to know about love, that it’s the delight of being in the presence of the loved one.
In fact, the name Rose more closely fitted his image of her, more the beloved than the mother,
the Red Mill where she served those he loathed and scorned, where she must parry the drunken remark and the insinuating smile because she must make a living, secure a future for him who longed only to make a future for her.
He must have one of those roses later on. A few pressed petals would make a good entry for the last page of the scrapbook.
How does one man, how does one man get the power to make the rest see in themselves what he sees in them? Where does he get the authority? But from somewhere he does get it.
It was not merely that the Burbanks had little in common with the other ranchers; it was that men and women in that country had only in common what could not be mentioned at dinner parties.
Or was he right in sensing that she boasted of stars earned and valentines received because she was — beautiful? How awful to lead a conversation around so that another was bound to say, because you were beautiful!
How strange, how strange. Since she had married a Burbank she had become sly. She had become dishonest. She had become an alcoholic, a common drunk.
