He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had
always been. One of those personalities who, in spite of all their
words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast
tradition of human failure--that, and the sense of death.
"I suppose I don't care," he answered.
One must be broad about these things, and Gloria being young, being
beautiful, must have reasonable privileges. Yet it wearied him that he
failed to understand.
WINTER
She rolled over on her back and lay still for a moment in the great bed
watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its
passage through the leaded panes into the room. For a time she had no
accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the events of the day before, or
the day before that; then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to
beat out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened quota of time
until her life was given back to her.
She could hear, now, Anthony's troubled breathing beside her; she could
smell whiskey and cigarette smoke. She noticed that she lacked complete
muscular control; when she moved it was not a sinuous motion with the
resultant strain distributed easily over her body--it was a tremendous
effort of her nervous system as though each time she were hypnotizing
herself into performing an impossible action.
Pages:
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298