Rebecca

Why did dogs make one want to cry? There was something so quiet and hopeless about their sympathy.

Men are simpler than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.

I was aware of a sense of freedom, as though I had no responsibilities at all. It was rather like a Saturday when one was a child. No lessons, and no prep. One could do as one liked.

I found this hardly comforting, and wondered if there was not some virtue in the quality of insincerity.

'A little while ago you talked about an invention,' he said, 'some scheme for capturing a memory. You would like, you told me, at a chosen moment to live the past again. I'm afraid I think rather differently from you. All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them.

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.

Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind.

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.

You have a very lovely and unusual name.”
“My father was a lovely and unusual person.”

Funny to think that the course of my existence hung like a thread upon that quality of hers