Sublime

she was “a wrinkled old fairy all the same.”

She might be very young, or her own age.

In the shop my appearance had hardly mattered. In any case book buyers are usually short-sighted. Now I compared myself with those elegant women, or perhaps one elegant woman, in Italy, and felt ashamed. And I had hoped to make an impression simply by being myself! I dispatched naïveté for ever, consigning it to a prelapsarian time before doubt had

like most people I was a bit attached to the person I had been most of my life, I decided I wanted to look pretty much exactly the way I had before, just three sizes larger.

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

wiry-spry