Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

Last night it was pullulating with women. You’re to come away at once, out of danger.

teddy-bear

“The women are still doing whatever women do to themselves before they come downstairs. Sloth has undone them.

while the blue-gray smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

he wrote in a style of remote fantasy—…

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Because her sex was the palpable difference between the familiar and the strange, it seemed to fill the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female, as I had felt of no woman before.

It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.