Life After Life

Ursula was left to stare at the floral wallpaper. She had never noticed before that the flowers were wisteria, the same flower that grew on the arch over the back porch. This must be what in literature was referred to as “deflowering,” she thought. It had always sounded like a rather pretty word.

it was one of those questions you couldn’t ask in case he were to tell the truth.

A girl surely should know better than to be caught on those back stairs—or in the shrubbery—like the heroine in a gothic novel, the kind that Bridget was so fond of. But who would have suspected that the reality of it would be so sordid and bloody? He must have sensed something in her, something unchaste, that even she was unaware of. Before lockin

Miss Woolf said that she had had a “harrowing” late night “chat” with Herr Zimmerman about the situation in Germany. “Things are terrible over there, you know.” “I know,” Ursula said. “Do you?” Miss Woolf said, her interest piqued. “Do you have friends there?” “No,” Ursula said. “No one. Sometimes one just knows, doesn’t one?”

“The self-importance of gods,” Millie said, “what a wonderful title for a novel.” Millie, needless to say, wanted to be a writer. Or an artist, or a singer, or a dancer, or an actress. Anything where she might be the center of attention.

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

“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.)

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.

Ursula thought that she would rather die for Fox Corner than “England.” For meadow and copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood. Well, that was England, wasn’t it? The blessed plot.