The Enchanted April

by Elizabeth von Arnim

is true she liked him most when he wasn’t there, but then she usually liked everybody most when they weren’t there.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again,—not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organisation, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice.

It didn’t seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions, to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one—oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious! All