Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait—a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.

just as tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the generation that first sang them has turned to dust.

It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands.

This nostalgia for what was still there

and who liked both virtues and commodities to be solid,

But one can be born to a different tune

There’s nothing like his own way for a sick person—

but the things one’s eyes and ears tells one, they ain’t in words, so to speak, and it’s not easy to tell other folks what they say

No, she must wait till she was of age, or married, or ... was there any change of condition that could alter her relations with the widow, and destroy the parasite growth of sullen docility which, for as long as she could remember, had rotted her volition and warped her actions?

Love the old prose