Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. AnstrutherVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
British -- Germany -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Germany -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
I have waited all day, and there has been no telegram. Well, on Monday I
shall get a letter about it, and how much more satisfactory that is.
Today after all is nearly over, and there is only Sunday to be got
through first, and I shall be helped to endure that by the looking
forward. Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It
makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and
nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the
first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyes
with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road.
I suppose in time the regular repetition of shocks does wear out hope,
and then I imagine one's youth collapses like a house of cards. Real old
age begins then, inward as well as outward; and one's soul, that kept so
bravely young for years after one's face got its first wrinkles,
suddenly shrivels up. Its light goes out. It is suddenly and
irrecoverably old, blank, dark, indifferent.
Sunday Night.
I didn't finish my letter last night because, observing the strain I had
got into, I thought it better for your comfort that I should go to bed.
So I did. And while I went there I asked myself why I should burden you
with the dull weight of my elementary reflections. You who are so clever
and who think so much and so clearly, must laugh at their
elementariness. They are green and immature, the acid juice of an
imperfect fruit that has always hung in the shadow. And yet I don't
think you must laugh, Roger. It would, after all, be as cruel as the
laughter of a child watching a blind man ridiculously stumbling among
the difficulties of the way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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