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Christian Thrale credited himself with special sensibilities towards pictures. In galleries where art had been sagely institutionalized, he walked and paused like all the rest, yet believed his own stare more penetrating than most; and, when others strolled ahead, would linger, patently engrossed b…

"Or the best." He smiled. His hound-face had lines, at eyelids and mouth, that were now at rest but might be put to use. His dark hair, greying, fell loose over his forehead. His body, too heavy and indolent for the precise little chair, was that of an active man who had taught himself to wait: an …

In her room Caroline Bell would fall into long reverie, remembering though not pondering sights, episodes, and sensations, or lines she had read; like an old woman ruminating on the long, long past. She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, wi…

Caro lay in her frozen bed and stared at the skylight, which was a sheet of clotted ice. She lay in darkness or in moonlight, remembering how, one evening of the previous year, she had come in from work to find Paul sitting at her table writing; and that he had got up and embraced her and asked, "H…

"My fear is, you will never need anything that I can provide." He neither wished to impute high motives to his anxiety for her nor to underrate a selflessness inseparable from love. He had seen how people grew cruel with telling themselves of their own compassion: nothing made you harder than that.…