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If one only could … But it required strength. It took it out of one so. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the r…

[...] She could no longer go back into circulation, as she had done so often before. The little apartment in the Village, the cocktail parties, the search for a job, the loneliness, the harum-scarum, Bohemian habits, all this was now unthinkable for her. She had lost the life-giving illusion, the s…

“Accept yourself as you are,” he said. “Stop trying to dig in to your motives. You have set yourself a moral standard that nobody could live up to. Your early religious training …” Ah dear, she thought, how they all deplore my early religious training. “For God’s sake,” her husband said, “give up w…

[...] “Your mother,” he said once, succinctly, “was cut from a different bolt of cloth.” This, she recognized, was for him the sustaining myth, the classic delusion of the frontier, where a pretty woman is a pretty woman, poverty is no crime, and all the nonsense of family and religion and connecti…

Yet what were you going to do? You could not treat your life-history as though it were an inferior novel and dismiss it with a snubbing phrase. It had after all been like that. Her peculiar tragedy (if she had one) was that her temperament was unable to assimilate her experience; the raw melodrama …