Collected Stories

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground—or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.

The only criticism that might have been made of them was that their background and prospects had been provided so amply as to encroach a little on the scope of the present; nothing had been left to chance—perhaps on the assumption that chance is a detrimental element.

She thought of him as a source of knowledge rather than experience; a good, though not contemporary mind, a person rather than a man.

They were sitting, this evening, on either side of Charles Holmes, who was an Englishman, and who, from shyness, talked and listened with a habitual vagueness, glancing at Dora, his wife, sitting opposite.

Nettie and he—a sort of perseverance, a persistent understanding. Where would Nettie have found strength for the unremitting concessions of daily life? She was precipitated from delight to lamentation without logical sequence, as though life were too short; she must cram everything in and perhaps sort it out later.

It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn’t cope with love. (In her experience, at any rate, it had always got out of hand.) But, after all, it was the only state in which one could consider oneself normal; which engaged all one’s capacities, rather than just those developed by necessity—or shipwreck. One never

Through the slit that now parted the shutters, the old man stared despondently at the day. The scene, it was true, was of dimensions comparable to those of his own land—in fact, he had made the comparison all too frequently, as though Tuscany were remarkable only for this similarity—but then there was that sky. He had never experienced such a sky.

One can’t ask to be left alone, she thought, or not to be touched, even once in a great while, without creating a scene—without changing everything.