Years of Grace quotes

Muriel had a real suit, with a skirt and Eton jacket, and her dresses reached almost to her boot tops. It was too bad of her father. The song wasn’t so very funny, after all. Nor so very true.

Life didn’t seem at all a joke to Jane as she skipped down Pine Street, that crisp October morning, arm in arm with her friends.

She was wondering whether André would be waiting under the Water Works Tower. And whether Flora and Muriel would try to tease them if he were. And what he would think, if they did.

He wore a funny navy-blue beret on his sleek black hair and he was spinning a top. No other Chicago boy of sixteen ever spun a top and Jane had never seen any other beret.

That was the kind of thing that André did that made Flora and Muriel think that he was sissy.

Jane wished he wouldn’t. She liked to spin tops herself and the beret was most becoming. Still, there was no sense in willfully laying yourself open to mockery. Flora and Muriel had no idea how nice André really was.

“You’ll like that book, Jane,” she said, “when you’re older.”

That was the way André’s family always spoke of books. Just as if they were people living in the world with you, nice friendly people, whom you were bound to meet some day and get on famously with when you finally knew them.

Jane followed André into his little bedroom. His paints were all set out on a table with some sheets of Bristol board.

The street lamps were flickering on their tall standards as they stepped out on Chicago Avenue. The drugstore windows across the street in the Kinzie flats glittered with yellow light. Great green and red and blue urns of coloured water glowed behind the glass.

“Pure colour,” said André. “Pure as light.”

He took her arm as they crossed the car tracks. Jane held her elbow very stiff and straight but she felt a little thrill run right up her arm from where his fingers rested on her coat sleeve.

“Have you read it?” asked Jane rudely. And she meant to be rude. She knew her mother couldn’t read French. Isabel herself couldn’t read it, half as well as Jane could.

“You don’t have to read books, Jane,” said her mother with dignity, “to know that they shouldn’t be read. This book is very unpleasant.”

“Why, it’s notorious!” said Isabel.

Jane went into her own room alone. She could hear their whispering voices, broken by low laughter, long after her light was out.

It was funny, Jane thought, but it was perfectly true. Telling lies made you trustworthy.

“They always do,” said André. And added simply,

“They’re so much in love.”

That was a strange comment, thought Jane, to make on a pair of parents. She would never have thought of saying it about her father and mother. Nor about Flora’s mother and Mr. Furness. To be sure Mrs.

Very different from her father’s “Oh, all right, Lizzie!” that terminated so many domestic discussions. Funny, when she thought of it, she could hardly remember Flora’s mother ever speaking to Mr. Furness at all, really speaking to him, even to argue.

Marriage was a strange thing.

It began, she supposed, as André said, by being so much in love and it ended?

“Oh,” she said again, “I just do what’s expected of me.”

“That’s a bad habit,” said Mr. Duroy seriously. “Especially for youth. You must stop that in time, or you’ll never get anywhere.”

Jane looked at him, a little perplexed. André came back with the kettle.

He managed a wavering smile.

“No promises,” he said. “Just thoughts.”

“All my thoughts!” said Jane. He stumbled toward the door. On the threshold he turned again.

Jane only buried her face the deeper. There was a little pause.

“Kid,” said her father, “you’re so young that you don’t know that you’ll get over it. You get over everything.”

Jane thought that was a horrible philosophy. She heard her father moving about a little helplessly. Then he bent over and touched her shoulder.

“Since I can’t marry André,” she said solemnly, “I’d rather be here than anywhere else.”

“It’s funny,” said Jane to Agnes. “All the years you’re trying to get into college you think it’s the work that counts. When you get there you see it’s the people.”

Jane and Agnes were sitting on their window-seat, looking out over the gnarled branches of the cherry tree. It was an afternoon in late January. The sun was sinking behind the stripped boughs of the maples and the campus was covered with snow.

Miss Thomas’s eyes were like windows, too, but the soul inside was very different.

Flora’s mother’s soul was like a rose-lit room, a little intimate interior where gay and charming and tender things were bound to happen.

Miss Thomas’s soul was like a vast arena, a battleground, Jane sometimes thought, where strangely impersonal wars were waged with a curiously personal ardour. Moreover, Miss Thomas could shut her windows. Flora’s mother’s were always wide open. Inviting, unprotected.

But Miss Thomas’s confidence in the power of youth seemed to remain unshaken. She was never tired of directing it. Agnes said that was why she was a great college president.

“She works,” said Agnes, “to make what she believes in come true. You can’t do more than that.”

That was what Agnes did, in her small way, and Marion Park, too, who had turned out to be quite as nice as she looked. But did Jane? Jane often wondered.

But her father had only laughed.

“The blue will come out in the wash,” he had prophesied cheerfully. “I doubt if it’s a fast colour.”

Jane doubted it, too, as she sat on the window-seat with Agnes. Agnes had the Latin examination paper in her hand.

“Well—we won’t,” said Agnes obligingly.

“We’re intellectuals,” explained Jane sweetly. “Sit down, Mugsy, and look at the cherry blossoms.”

Mugsy dropped down cross-legged on the grass.

“You make me sick,” she said, with perfect amity, and strolled off across the campus.

“This place is so nice,” said Jane, returning to the contemplation of the cherry blossoms. “You can insult your dearest friends with perfect impunity.”

Marion approached, Livy in hand. She waved two letters at Jane.

“ ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound! But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun!’ ”

What fun to know lines like that! To have them always with you, like toys in your pocket, to play with when you were lonely.

“ ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Jane knew all about the inward eye. But she thanked the poet for the phrase.

If her education had done nothing else for her, Jane reflected, it had provided her with an apt quotation for every romantic emotion.

The Commencement exercises dragged wearily on. Jane couldn’t remember, when she tried to concentrate, just what the speaker had said his subject was. He seemed to be talking about Opportunity. Jane didn’t hear him define it.

The room was very hot, and very, very noisy. Jane had to scream to be heard.

It was easier to talk when you screamed, she discovered, much easier than in a silent room. When you screamed, things seemed funny.

Presently there was a little disturbance at the dining-room door. Lots of young men came in, and then Muriel. Muriel looked flushed and terribly excited. Her cheeks were rose pink. She was waving her sweet peas and laughing at everyone. Close behind her was Mr.

“It’s a very plain name,” she said. “I was named for my grandmother.”

“Not plain,” he answered. “Simple. Like your hair. Like your face, too.”

They had reached the punch table. He handed her her glass.

“How Lily Furness could do this to Muriel,” Jane heard her say, very solemnly. “It will kill Mrs. Lester.”

“I think the honours are still Muriel’s,” said Mr. Ward gravely. “She did a good deal to Lily Furness first.”

Jane walked very slowly and soberly down Pine Street in the brilliant April sunshine. The grass plots were already green and there was an emerald mist on the plume-like boughs of the elm trees.

“I can see that,” said Stephen. He tried to muster an admiring smile, but, under Agnes’s dispassionate eye, it didn’t quite come off.

“Life is real and life is earnest,” explained Jane sweetly, “and the grave is not its goal.”

Stephen grinned at her very appreciatively. He was grateful for her levity. But Agnes was quite disgusted. She rose abruptly.

Mr. Ward was looking down at her very tenderly.

“Don’t get too fond of anyone, kid,” he said, “just yet.”

Jane was waiting with her skates in the hall, when Stephen rang the doorbell. She opened the door herself. He smiled down at her.

Jane shook her head. She couldn’t explain. But she knew.

Love was no hothouse flower, forced to reluctant bud. Love was a weed that flashed unexpectedly into bloom on the roadside.

Love was not fanned to flame. Love was a leaping fire, sprung from a casual spark, a fire that wouldn’t be smothered, a fire that—

The mock pathos of the jingling tune held a dreadful irony. Jane had suddenly a desperate sense of a trap, closing in upon her. Life shouldn’t be like this.

Life shouldn’t force your hand.

In moments of decision you should always be calm, untrammelled by circumstance.

“Come, kid,” said Mr. Ward. He was standing by the open door. Jane followed him slowly into the front hall.

Life wasn’t fair, thought Jane.

“Miss Jane,” said Minnie, “Mr. Carver has called.”

“Oh, yes,” said Stephen persuasively, “you want to win the war.”

Jane felt a refreshing flash of levity.

“Do you expect to win it?” she asked lightly.

It was pleasant to be alone. At Gull Rocks, Jane perversely reflected, one seldom was. The Carvers, as a family, were animated by the clan spirit. They did things, if at all, in concert. They even did nothing in concert.

They abhorred solitude as nature does a vacuum.

Jane’s fingers were busy and her eyes were occupied, but her mind was not concerned with the work in hand. Quite mechanically she purled and plained and tossed the blue wool over her amber needles. She was thinking wise, thirty-six-year-old thoughts about the relative-in-law complex.

His grey sack suit was just a little wrinkled after a hot afternoon in a New England train. Yes—Stephen looked just like what he was—the forty-four-year-old first vice-president of the Midland Loan and Trust Company, badly in need of his summer vacation.

Men drew the short straw in the lottery of life, reflected Jane, as she looked at him.

Men like Stephen, at least. Miss Thomas had claimed it was a man-made world. If so, men had certainly made it with a curious disregard of their own comfort and convenience.

“How’s the weather been? Good sailing breeze, all month?” As he spoke he turned to smile at her. Jane regarded him steadily. Poor old Stephen—he looked very tired. As for herself, from the nature of his smile Jane knew what she looked like.

There was absolutely nothing to be done about it. She looked like Jane.

“I’d go, if I were you,” said Silly.

“Exactly,” said Agnes, briefly.

“I’ve always had more ideas than cash.”

Her face clouded a little under Jane’s incredulous stare, then lightened suddenly with conviction. “If you think there’s an idea in my head that I wouldn’t sacrifice for a dollar, you’re very much mistaken. Jane—you have to have money to be happy.

“I want to talk to you,” said Jimmy disarmingly.

“There’s nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you’re talking, that is, with the right person.”

Jane, still staring up at him, felt her features harden defensively.

“Not even a purgatory,” said Jane. “I’m a very naive person. I’ve never experienced much of anything.”

“Perhaps that will be your hell,” said Jimmy.

The door behind them opened suddenly and Flora stood on the platform.

Curious, she thought, the gap between the points of view of different generations. The facts of life were always the same, but people thought about them so differently. New thoughts, reflected Jane, about the same old actions. Was it progress or merely change?

Sex was a loaded pistol, thought Jane, thrust into the hand of humanity.

Her mother’s generation had carried it carefully, fearful of a sudden explosion. Her generation, and Isabel’s, waved it nonchalantly about, but, after all, with all their carelessness, they didn’t fire it off any oftener than their parents had.

“I don’t know,” said Jane again. She turned to look into his contrite eyes.

There was something irresistibly funny about a penitent faun.

Jane could not help smiling. Jimmy drew a long breath at the sight of her smile.

She could dismiss her vague forebodings on the world of women that waited for him if he didn’t. She could dismiss the thought of Stephen.

You could love the dead without disloyalty to the living.

Nevertheless, it was an act of treachery to Jimmy’s memory to allow herself to think, even for a moment, that he was better dead. Jimmy—dead. The thought was still incredible. She had never lost the illusion of his laughing, living presence.

“What do you think, Robin?” asked Jane. “You haven’t said a word all evening.”

“I think it’s fierce,” said Robin solemnly. “Like life.”

“But what can we do?” persisted Jane.

“But what can we do?” persisted Jane.

“Nothing, probably,” said Robin. “Again like life.”

Jane slipped her arm through Stephen’s. They walked slowly with their guests to the front door.

“Well, it makes life terribly difficult for parents,” sighed Jane. “And I can’t help thinking it may make life terribly difficult for children.”

“Life’s terribly difficult at times for everyone,” said Mr. Ward. “A little thing like filial obedience doesn’t solve all the problems.”

“When I think of the ex cathedra pronouncements that Mamma used to make!” cried Jane. “Why, I never thought of questioning them!”

“Yes,” said Cicily, “make her look quaint, you know; as if she were meant to be funny.”

“The first duty of a bridesmaid, in any case,” said Muriel, “is to look less pretty than the bride.”

“No one could help looking less pretty than these brides,” said Flora, with a glance from Belle to Cicily.

But was death, as a matter of fact, any more lonely than life? What had Jane ever known about her father’s actual earthly experience?

Parents knew little enough of the emotional lives of their children, but children knew nothing of the emotional lives of their parents.

The emotional life of a parent was a fantastic thought.

Everyone had. In the first disarming experience of love you tried to share that world. You flung open the door. You offered the key. But somehow, in spite of love, with time and incident the door swung slowly shut again.

You never noticed it until you found yourself locked securely in, with the key in your own pocket.

You really wondered how it had come to be there. You could not remember just when or why you had stopped saying—everything.

“It’s up to the doctor, Mumsy,” she said. “Babies always have their ups and downs. I can’t invent a formula.”

Courage and common sense, again, perhaps. Bravery and bravado.

But it did seem a little heartless—

“

Merely clairvoyante,

” smiled Isabel. “But I tell you, Jane, since Bert died, curiously enough, Muriel’s been rather lonely. She couldn’t talk to him, of course.

She looked barely out of the nursery with her dandelion head and her short slim skirts and her silly silky little legs! She might have been pushing her doll’s carriage down that drive! She shouldn’t be playing with thoughts like that, though.

Edged tools in the hands of a child.

Jane turned on her doorstep and walked slowly back into the living-room to ring for the waitress to remove the ravaged tea-tray. She sank down in Stephen’s armchair. Of course the silly child did not mean a word that she had been saying.

“I don’t know,” said Jane thoughtfully. “I guess God’s here, all right, as much as He ever was. But you—you see Him differently.” Then suddenly it came to her just what sort of an age it was. “

It’s a graceless age!

” said Jane triumphantly.

Bert Lancaster’s side beneath the crystal chandelier of Flora’s little third-floor ballroom. Almost as young as Steve, quite as carefree, just as good-looking. But yet an ardent supporter of the vanished dignities and decencies and decorums.

Your husband’s point of view was a refuge, thought Jane. It was a sanctuary to which you fled from the assaults of time and your own children.

It was where you belonged. If your husband was fifty-eight, thought Jane, you wanted, yourself, to be fifty!

Something ought to happen in a room as charming as this. I feel just that way about everything, Mumsy—about my clothes and the way I look and all the trouble I take about the maids and the meals and the children.

I’m everlastingly setting the stage, but the drama never transpires.

I’d like a little bit of drama, Mumsy. Something nice and unexpected and exciting. Something different. Before I’m too old to enjoy it.”

“

Children can just wreck you,

” said Isabel.

Girls did not care nowadays what they said, or what was said to them. Jane tried to imagine what would have happened to a Bacchic young man at a dance in Chicago in the middle nineties. Social ostracism—nothing less.

Prohibition had turned ballrooms into barrooms.

But where was Cicily? There was Belle, lovely-looking, too, in that silver gauze gown. Could Isabel be right? Was she worried, was she really worried, over Cicily and Albert?

“It’s a compliment, Mumsy,” she said, “when your children are perfectly frank with you. But you won’t face facts.

Your generation believes in fairies!

” The hall was growing cold. Cicily closed the door. “I’m going to talk to Dad, myself, I think,” she said slowly.

Cicily drew a long breath. “Well, I believe you,” she said. “But I don’t know why I do.

Resisted temptations become lost opportunities, Mumsy.

Haven’t you always regretted it?”

“But that’s what you don’t know, Mumsy!” said Cicily, smiling. “And what I’ll never know either.

You have to choose in life!

”

Did they really believe it to be predominantly important?

Sex-fulfilment, Jane thought hotly, was predominantly important only in the monkey house. Elsewhere character counted.

But these children had character. They had managed this appalling affair with extraordinary ability and restraint. They had a code, Jane dimly perceived, a code that was based—on what? Bravado and barbarism or courage and common sense? It was very perplexing. It was very complicated.

“Does little Agnes feel that way about Marion?” asked Jane.

“The rising generation,” said Agnes with a smile, “doesn’t feel that way about anyone on God’s green earth.”

“Do you remember what Papa said about her,” said Jane, “that first night in Pembroke, when he sat next to her at supper? ‘I bet that girl will amount to something some day.’ ”

Jimmy would never have locked up his money in banks or sunk it in bricks and mortar. He wouldn’t have been any happier, really, on Beekman Place than he was on Charlton Street.

Jimmy’s happiness was always just around the corner.

”

“I hate to think of what’s before you, Jane,” said Agnes. “But remember one thing—there can’t be understanding between two generations. I’m convinced of that.

Love, Jane, and sympathy, but never understanding.

We must take our children’s ideas on faith. We can never make them our own. Remember that and save yourself unhappiness.”

Jane thought his crisp blond hair just a ripple too curly and the strength of his clear-cut jaw line a trifle weak.

Nothing made a man look weaker, Jane reflected with a twinkle, than a strong chin.

He was very nice and friendly, however. His name was Eric Arthur and he had a penchant for Russian wolf hounds. He had two with him on tour, with which he walked in Central Park every day at noon.

Silver-haired and slender in her grey French frock she no longer suggested anything as bright and gay and concrete as a Dresden-china shepherdess. Frail and faded, well-dressed and weary, there was something just a little shadowy about Flora.

She looked like a Sargent portrait of herself, Jane decided.

There was nothing shadowy, however, in her enthusiasm over this reunion.

“Of course I don’t mean you look the same, Jane,” she continued honestly. “But you look as if you were the same! And that’s even nicer.”

“We’re all the same,” said Jane stoutly. “That’s one of the things you learn by growing old. Nobody ever changes.”

“Children do,” smiled Flora. “I was surprised at Cicily. She was a pretty child, but she’s grown up into much more than that. You must be very proud of her.”