Sublime

infelicities

lessons in her way of viewing

un-English style of life. For me she became the archetypal representative of relaxed, urbane society seasoned with wit and fantasy—which is what I would like to be understood by the word “civilization.” Francis Croshaw was a

Even Henry and Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their accumulations – accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience. They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring foot on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a swo

Only an attractive young woman would take for granted a stranger’s interest in the minutiae of her life.

The next century would be like this, he told her. The rich moving away from cities, locked behind giant gates like medieval lords building moats.

She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.

Straw-soled shoes were all a part of this bold vision, they pointed subtly at the higher concepts.

found that the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental,