Sublime

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

There’s a flock of swans on a lake in the deepening autumn. As the nights grow colder, they all fly away. Except one, for reasons Alkaitis can’t remember: a lone swan who doesn’t perceive the approaching danger or loves the lake too much to leave even though it’s clearly time to go or is afflicted by hubris—the swan’s motivations were hazy and, Alk

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?

On the one hand the scene was hilarious: the manager bullied by his staff; the priestly Pianon helplessly aroused by the loud, ribald female crowd around him. Shay has always amused herself by envisioning him as the arid scholar Casaubon from Middlemarch, transplanted to the tropics and engrossed not in the Key to All Mythologies, but in an endless

Viola imposed upon her lover but a short probation. They were married, as was becoming, with great privacy, – almost with secrecy, – in the hope perhaps, as was waggishly remarked at the time, that the late Mrs Lloyd wouldn’t hear of it.

Full of kindliness and sympathy, St Cyres persuaded June to give up her flat in town and to come with her small boy to live at Manor Thatch. June had acquiesced at first. She was lonely and frightened and in debt. June St Cyres was one of those young women who can never live within their incomes, but she was shrewd enough to know that she could liv

“Steady on,” Fred Smith said, “you’ve gone a bit green round the gills, Miss Todd,” and Ursula had to blame it on the heat and insist on taking some fresh air on her own. She had in fact been feeling quite queasy lately. Sylvie put it down to a summer cold.

torpid

The spring unleashing its winter-coiled power, the joy of living.