Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
