After the assault, she spent nearly all her free time alone in her room, listening to the small radio her father had given her on her twelfth birthday. She lay motionless on her unmade bed, or sat motionless at her desk, and listened to the sounds that blared thinly from the scrollwork of the squat, ugly instrument on her bedside table, as if the voices, music, and laughter she heard were all that remained of her identity and as if even that were fading distantly into silence, beyond her recall. - P243
She was, he knew—and had known very early, he supposed one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and cared for that it might be fulfilled. Alien to the world, it had to live where it could not be at home; avid for tenderness and quiet, it had to feed upon indifference and callousness and noise. It was a nature that, even in the strange and inimical place where it had to live, had not the savagery to fight off the brutal forces that opposed it and could only withdraw to a quietness where it was forlorn and small andgently still. - P244
he could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died. - P252
‘You were a beautiful child’, he heard himself saying, and for a moment he did not know to whom he spoke. Light swam before his eyes, found shape, and became the face of his daughter, lined and somber and worn with care. He closed his eyes again. ‘In the study. Remember? You used to sit with me when I worked. You were so still, and the light ... the light ...’ The light of the desk lamp (he could see it now) had been absorbed by her studious small face that bent in childish absorption over a book or a picture, so that the smooth flesh glowed against the shadows of the room. He heard the small laughter echo in the distance. ‘Of course,‘ he said and looked upon the present face of that child. ‘Of course,‘ he said again, ‘you were always there’. - P281
Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that .. He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not knownwhat to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; andhe had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it gointothe chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. ‘Katherine.‘ - P285
He opened the book; and as he did so it became not his own. He let his fingers riffle through the pages and felt a tingling, as if those pages were alive. The tingling camethrough his fingers and coursed through his flesh and bone;he was minutely aware of it, and he waited until it containedhim, until the old excitement that was like terror fixed him where he lay. The sunlight, passing his window, shone upon the page, and he could not see what was written there.
The fingers loosened, and the book they had held moved slowly and then swiftly across the still body and fell into the silence of the room. - P288
|