Status Updates From The Unselected Journals of ...

"I do read. There, you see. I’m not a complete heathen. Not as much as I’d like. The reading, I mean. Not the being of a heathen."

Charles, sending Emma several "half-moon" smiles across the table:
Emma, writes in her journal: "It made him look like he was dying of the pox."
😂😭

Currently have laughed out loud twice. Once with a certain sermon directed at a certain duke, and once at a French translation about corn.

"... if the right man should come along, and money looks more like love than one would initially suppose, don’t turn your back on a chance for happiness merely because he has the means to save you.'

It was the most fiscally romantic thing I had ever heard."

I can’t believe I almost didn’t continue with the series after the first book.

*an understood Little Dorrit allusion for the win!*

"Strange is that unexpected moment that stays with you, that makes you think about it again. Strange is memorable, and compelling."

cont’d

That mythical pursuit that turns disparate elements to gold.^

^And he made a motion with his fingers that tied the four of us together. “What do you make of this?”

He was right about there being something, what I had sensed at dinner a few weeks back.

Remembering the very thoughts I’d had after our dinner weeks ago, I glanced from face to face.

Pierce shrugged.

Islington waited.

It was Hawkes who gave voice. “Alchemy.”

I shivered.

Leonidas died??? 😢

cont’d

Yet here I was, determined to fight in the shade.

I felt lifted.

Noble.

Spartan.^

^“A sky so full of arrows, they fought in the shade,” said Hawkes.

Pierce made some approving sound.

It was a noble response for King Leonidas to make, and I was inspired, considering everything with Cousin Archibald, and Maxwell’s burial, missing my parents down to the very bones, and the blank verse of my future—all arrows filling the sky to a tremendous amount.

^“I think I like the autumn best,” I mused aloud.^

Me too, Emma 🥹

^”Looking for quiet does not follow I was looking for solitude.”^

^It was then I thought that life—my life, in particular—wasn’t wholly worth giving up on yet.^

The Reprobates Ten—Nine—will do that to you 😉🥹

^October 29th

All the trees on the street have gone gold.

It makes me feel so very sad.^

^He saw Evelyn, made some internal calculation that played out on his face, and fell a half step behind, walking on the diagonal, setting the silent chessboard between us. Perhaps so I couldn’t be accosted without a fight.^

That’s so good

^“You would come with me?”

“Of course I’m coming with you. Don’t be daft. My friends do not go to war alone.”^

I like that—facing something hard is as facing their own war

^My feelings for October are fierce: a sharp love of cool air, a season transforming the landscape towards, and through, death. I’ve always loved it.^

Me: 🥹🥹

I like “Echo” by Christina Rossetti