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I am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual.
(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)
“You have grown more beautiful,” I said. “And you have grown into an outrageous liar,”
(I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)
I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a soldier, I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots.
Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.
The war had been hard on my feet and my knees and my faith in humanity.
“I am not the soldier I was.” “None of us are what we were,”
Lovely is not the word I would have used to describe it. In need of fire and holy water, perhaps.
“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.”
“The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.”
But there’s a price you pay for being good at some things.
His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.
Frankly, I’d only said it because I thought it was the sort of thing that might appeal to an Englishwoman, pip-pip, cheerio, God save the Queen, and so forth.
“The animal is female,” said Denton dispassionately. And if it were human, would it be diagnosed with hysterical catalepsy?
“You look like I feel,” I told him. “What a coincidence,” he said. “I feel about how you look.”
