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She must have been there when he came in. In these old houses you only had to keep still and stay quiet in order to fade into the background, like a lizard on a stone wall.
The housekeeper had done her best, but as he told himself, blood is thicker than soap and water.
What was she doing in the library in the middle of the night?” “Oh, she wanders about the place at all hours,” Osborne said, in a tone dismissive of the ways of women in general, and of his wife in particular.
Helpless nostalgia was the curse of his steadily dwindling caste.
I’m not sure that I did decide—I’m not sure anyone decides anything. It seems to me we drift, and that all our decisions are made in retrospect.”
Though he had tried, over the years, he had not managed to accustom himself to the taste either of fermented grain or rotted grapes.
Snow falls absentmindedly, Strafford thought, absentmindedly.
I have the greatest respect for your Church and your creed, which has produced so many fine minds—and fine sensibilities, if I may put it that way. But then”—here he gave a little sigh—“Protestantism is not so much a religion as a reaction against a religion, isn’t that so?”
Some people make it their life’s work, being unhappy. And making everyone around them unhappy, too, of course. It probably begins as a kind of game, in order not to be bored, or something, and then it just sort of hardens into a way of life, and you don’t notice anymore that you’re doing it to yourself.”
By the green glow from the dashboard he saw the young man’s eyes in the driving mirror swivel to meet his own. Why is it, he wondered, that people always seem so sinister when they look at you in the mirror like that? It was like being spied at through a letter box.
