Life After Life

sometimes Millie burned just a little too brightly.

He was one of those people who stared at you with a meaningful smile on their face, as if he was somehow intellectually and spiritually superior, when the fact was he was simply socially inept.

“Vanity, thy name is woman,” Derek said with what seemed like a forced joviality. He was not, Ursula noticed, as comfortable in social situations as she had first thought. She smiled at him, feeling a new bond. She was marrying a stranger, she realized. (“Everyone marries a stranger,” Hugh said.)

“There are other universities if you’re so set on being a bluestocking,” Sylvie said. Sylvie, although she never quite came out and said it, thought academia was pointless for girls. “After all, woman’s highest calling is to be a mother and a wife.”

Being a bride was nothing, being a wife was everything.

Ursula watched as Mr. Winton waded back through the waves, carrying Roland’s limp little body in his arms. Pamela and Ursula had thought the tide was going out but it was coming in, already filling the moat and lapping at the mound of sand which would soon be gone forever. An ownerless hoop bowled past, driven by the breeze. Ursula stared out to se

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again,” Teddy said, “until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” “I think it would be exhausting. I would quote Nietzsche to you but you would probably thump me.”

Ursula found it easier than she had expected to lock this occurrence away. After all, hadn’t Sylvie herself said that the definition of an indiscretion was that you didn’t speak of it afterward?

Time isn’t circular,” she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a… palimpsest.”