Sublime

She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking at them. She thought of often having them by her, to feed her eye at these little fountains of pure colour. ‘Shall you wear them in company?’ said Celia, who was watching her with real curiosity as to what she would do. Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her

she was fifteen or sixteen—it was before her father died. She had taken him by the hands, starting to tell a story about the convent school in Paris where she had been living. How lovely she had been then; how lovely she still was.

Moody, who loved art, was watching Pearl and wishing – not for the first time – that he were a photographer, so that he could capture the way the light from the frosted-glass gallery ceiling hit her upturned face and made it glow.

The first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them ornamental.

It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might have an almond or caraway seed in it—though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar—and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man

There, between the folded plaits, I saw a loose pearl, whose size equalled that of a coco-nut.

That child who she thought had been her opposite but who had, deep inside, inherited and carried and nursed that spark her mother had long ago tamped down, that same burning certainty that she knew right from wrong. She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: