Indian Summer quotes

and he involuntarily afforded her the coveted excuse by the slight noise he made in changing his position in order to be able to go away as soon as he had seen whether she was pretty or not.

At forty-one the question is still important to every man with regard to every woman.

The gentle surprise conveyed in the exclamation, without time for recognition, convinced Colville, upon a cool review of the facts, that the lady had known him before their eyes met.

… sufficiently sweet, playing about her little mouth, which was yet not too little, and the refined and indefinite perfume which exhaled from the ensemble of her silks, her laces, and her gloves, like an odorous version of that otherwise impalpable quality which women call style.

She had, with all her flexibility, a certain charming stiffness, like the stiffness of a very tall feather.

“And have you been here a great while?” she asked, turning her head slowly toward Colville, and looking at him with a little difficulty she had in raising her eyelids;

The lady looked a little puzzled, but interested. “In a state of prhe-existence?” she repeated.

“Yes; when I was young,” he added, catching the gleam in her eye. “When I was twenty-four. A great while ago.”

“You must be an Amerhican,” said the lady, with a laugh.

at least no one else carried a crush hat.

At forty-one a man is still very much of a boy

, and Colville was obscurely willing that Mrs. Bowen, whose life since they last met at an evening party had been passed chiefly at New York and Washington, should see that he was a man of the world in spite of Des Vaches.

“Oh, I can’t imagine it. I should think that recalling the old emotions would be perfectly fascinating.”

“Yes, if they’d come when you do call them. But they’re as contrary-minded as spirits from the vasty deep. I’ve been shouting around here for my old emotions all day, and I haven’t had a responsive squeak.”

“Oh!” cried Miss Graham, staring full-eyed at him. “How delightful!” Effie Bowen turned away her pretty little head and laughed, as if it might not be quite kind to laugh at a person’s joke to his face.

“Don’t you think,” she asked, drawing it from the samovar, “that it is very sad having the convents suppressed?”

“It was very sad having slavery abolished⁠—for some people,” suggested Colville; he felt the unfairness of the point he had made.

Colville stood stirring his second cup of tea, when the portiere parted, and showed Mrs. Bowen wistfully pausing on the threshold. Her face was pale, but she looked extremely pretty there.

“Oh, she couldn’t have done it to gratify her vanity!”

“Girls are very queer, my dear,” said Mrs. Bowen, as if the fact were an abstraction.

She mused upon the flat of her screen, while Miss Graham plied her needle in silence.

“Oh, I never do! I remember the least one of them, and all they do and say.”

“It seems to me you used to do everything.”

“It seems to me as if I did.

“Oh, I think they do! I’ve had dreams that I’ve lived on for days. Do you ever have prophetic dreams?”

“Yes; but they never come true. When they do, I know that I didn’t have them.”

“I mean that we are all so fond of the marvellous that we can’t trust ourselves about any experience that seems supernatural.

“Oh!” cried the girl, half puzzled, half amused. “Then of course you don’t believe in ghosts?”

“Yes; I expect to be one myself some day. But I’m in no hurry to mingle with them.”

Imogene smiled vaguely, as if the talk pleased her, even when it mocked the fancies and whims which, after so many generations that have indulged them, she was finding so fresh and new in her turn.

“Do you never like to talk in earnest?”

“Well, not often,” said Colville. “Because, if you do, you can’t say with a good conscience afterward that you were only in fun.”

“Oh! And do you always like to talk so that you can get out of things afterward?”

“I like people to be outspoken—to say everything they think,” said the girl, regarding him with a puzzled look.

“Then I foresee that I shall become a favourite,” answered Colville. “I say a great deal more than I think.”

She looked at him again with envy, with admiration, qualifying her perplexity. They had come to a point where some moss-grown, weather-beaten statues stood at the corners of the road that traversed the bosky stretch between the avenues of the Cascine.

“No,” said Imogene. “Are they good?”

“They are much better than good⁠—they are the very worst rococo.”

“What makes you say they are beautiful, then?”

She stood and watched Colville skim stones over the current. “When you stand by the shore of a swift river like this, or near a railroad train when it comes whirling by, don’t you ever have a morbid impulse to fling yourself forward?”

“Not at my time of life,” said Colville, stooping to select a flat stone. “Morbid impulses are one of the luxuries of youth.”

He threw the stone, which skipped triumphantly far out into the stream. “That was beautiful, wasn’t it, Miss Effie?”

“but you people here pass your days in a round of unbroken English, except when you talk with your servants. I’m not sure you don’t speak English with the shop people. I can hardly get them to speak Italian to me.”

“Perhaps they think you can speak English better,” said the lady.

This went over Florence; in a week it was told to Colville as something said to someone else. He fearlessly reclaimed it as said to himself, and this again was told.

Though it pierced him, Colville could not help admiring the neatness of this thrust. “I didn’t know you were so ironical, Mrs. Bowen.”

“Ironical? Not at all.”

“Ah! I see I’m not forgiven.”

“Perhaps I was drowsing over my book and dreamed it.

We become very strange and interesting studies to ourselves as we live along.

”

“Why not?

It is very unimportant where one dies. A moment after your breath is gone you are in exile forever⁠—or at home forever.

”

No,” added the old man thoughtfully, “I think that the friends of progress must abandon assassination as invariably useless.

The trouble was not that Alessandro was alive, but that Florence was dead.

Assassination always comes too early or too late in any popular movement. It may be,” said Mr.

“Yes, in a sense it is.

The past is humanity set free from circumstance, and history studied where it was once life is the past rehumanised.

”

“Not at all!

Men fail, but man succeeds.

I don’t know what it all means, or any part of it; but I have had moods in which it seemed as if the whole, secret of the mystery were about to flash upon me.

“Only up to a certain point.” Mr. Waters seemed to be patient of any direction which the other might be giving the talk. “

Nature is a savage. She has good impulses, but you can’t trust her altogether.

”

“

Being kind and good isn’t liking.

I know what she thinks. But of course I can’t expect to convince you of it; no one else could see it.”

“

I wish there was no one in the world but you and me.

”

“I wish there was no one in the world but you and me.”

“Ah, you’d find it very crowded at times,” said Colville sadly.

“Well, well,” he added, “I’ll go to your fandangoes, because you want me to go.”

The tears began to steal down her cheeks, and Colville sighed. It seemed to him that somebody or other was always crying.

A man never quite gets used to the tearfulness of women.

“Oh, don’t mind it,” he said. “If you wish me to go, I will go! Or die in the attempt,” he added, with a smile.

“

The more she disliked them, the better she would use them.

It’s because our engagement is so distasteful to her that she’s determined to feel that she did nothing to oppose it.”

“The air would bring you up,” said Colville to Mrs. Bowen. “

Switzerland’s the only country where you’re perfectly sure of waking new every morning.

”

“

Well, I shouldn’t, in your place. But in mine, I much prefer to wake up another person. Only it’s pretty hard on the other person.

”

“Not a bit. But

Carlyle’s so earnest that he can’t talk straight.

”

Let a few of them go by without doing anything for you! And as for reading, why not read when you’re hungry, just as you eat?

Shouldn’t you hate to take up a course of roast beef, or a course of turkey?

”

“Oh, there’s no hurry,” he said lazily. “

Life is rather a long affair⁠—if you live.

There appears to be plenty of time, though people say not, and I think it would be rather odious to make every day of use. Let a few of them go by without doing anything for you!

But in her own room, where she locked herself in, sobs mingled with the laughter which broke crazily from her lips as she removed this ribbon and that jewel, and pulled the bracelets from her wrists.

A man would have plunged from the house and walked the night away; a woman must wear it out in her bed.

“Oh yes, it’s very well in its way; but I prefer the rush of the American spring; no thought of mild weather this morning; a warm, gusty rain tomorrow night; day after tomorrow a burst of blossoms and flowers and young leaves and birds.

I don’t know whether we were made for our climate or our climate was made for us, but its impatience and lavishness seem to answer some inner demand of our go-ahead souls.

This happens to be the week of the peach blossoms here, and you see their pink everywhere today, and you don’t see anything else in the blossom line.

“The landscape. It’s too full of every possible interest. What a history is written all over it, public and private! If you don’t take it simply like any other landscape, it becomes an oppression.

It’s well that tourists come to Italy so ignorant, and keep so. Otherwise they couldn’t live to get home again; the past would crush them.

”

“Yes; we would give them a collation in the basement of the City Hall, and drive them out to the cemetery.

The Americans and Etruscans are very much alike in that⁠—they always show you their tombs.

”

“How you always like to burrow into the past!” interrupted Imogene.

“Well, it’s rather difficult burrowing into the future,” returned Colville defensively.

Accepting the challenge, he added: “Yes, I should really like to meet a few Etruscans in Fiesole this morning. I should feel as if I’d got amongst my contemporaries at last; they would understand me.”

Theoretically he ought to have been devoured by remorse and chagrin, but as a matter of fact he suffered very little from either.

Even in people who are in full possession of their capacity for mental anguish one observes that after they have undergone a certain amount of pain they cease to feel.

Colville amused himself a good deal with Effie’s endeavours to entertain him and take care of him. The child was with him every moment that she could steal from her tasks, and her mother no longer attempted to stem the tide of her devotion.

“I can’t believe it’s right staying away from the country so long.”

People often say such things in Europe.

“No, I don’t either, if you’ve got anything to do there.”

The old gentleman smiled.

“The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt of it in my case,” said Colville. “If I’d consulted my own comfort and advantage, I should still be at Palazzo Pinti.”