The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard

The problem, she’s starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders. He

Then he does mention home – he mentions his daughter, he implies a wife, and never names either – and this brings a grieving splitting sensation: there’s a whole life there she cannot see and will never occupy – a series of loves and languages all incomprehensible to her, she is absolutely peripheral, bolted-on, and the bolts are coming loose.

She walks home in a daze, thinking of the last thing Olivia said to her. “Gifts are fragile. You must never entrust yours to people who might break it.” She doesn’t say who she might be thinking of, and Barbara doesn’t need her to. She has what she needs and doesn’t expect to return to the Harris house again.

The fact is, I never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It is a noose, you know. Temper, now. There is temper. And a husband likes to be master.’ ‘I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higher duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease,’ said poor Dorothea.