The Duke's Daughter Quotes

“To an outsider the birthday dinner would probably have seemed very dull. A working landowner and his wife; a female cousin with a mop of fair hair and a tanned skin who was practically never seen out of breeches and knew bulls inside out; a young man out of the army learning to farm, and an old estate agent; and splitting one bottle of champagne to drink the old agent’s health. But to anyone who knew Barsetshire it was the county in miniature with its tradition of work, its acceptance of the immutable law that practically all those who depended on one were in their different way lazy, incompetent, untruthful, grasping; but none the less their children to be helped while young and allowed when old to go on living at a very low rent or none at all in cottages that could have been let for enormous sums to outsiders. And their lives were devoted to Rushwater, which would use them, as it had used Mr. Macpherson, till their eyes were dim and their clothes hung loosely on the skeletons that lurked in them.”
― Angela Thirkell, The Duke's Daughter

“Not that she loved Tom immeasurably more than her other children, but she knew more or less what the other three were, while with Tom, as with every child who has seen war at close quarters, she was conscious of scars she could not see, of the great gulf fixed for ever, and ever widening, between fighting men and civilians, and could only guess through a glass darkly at what he had seen and heard and felt and what effect active service had had on him. These soldiers, volunteer or conscript, so young and so old, so near to our affection, so infinitely and eternally far from our comprehension: how can we begin to help them?”
― Angela Thirkell, The Duke's Daughter