Less Than Angels

She had remembered a poem, cherished by many schoolgirls for many different kinds of love, the sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, beginning, When do I see thee most, beloved one?

Love at first sight can hardly ever be mutual, though it may seem to have been when discussed and remembered later.

‘Drinking alone is rather depressing, I always think.’

They had learned early in life what it is to bear love’s burdens, listening patiently to their men’s troubles and ever ready at their typewriters, should a manuscript or even a short article get to the stage of being written down.

It would need the pen of a Dostoievsky to do justice to their dreadful lives

She wished she were cleverer and had a flat of her own and she would have liked to be in love.

The work that was to have been done up here, the poems written, even the little informal parties that were to have been held, had not come to anything after all.

Ah, my childhood, my innocent childhood, she thought, remembering a Tchekov play which she had recently seen.

His life did not seem to have allowed much time so far for what he called ‘amorous dalliance’.

Catherine often wondered whether anthropologists became so absorbed in studying the ways of strange societies that they forgot what was the usual thing in their own.