Boring Husband Quotes

Life is never going to be boring with Christian, and I’m in this for the long haul. I love this man: my husband, my lover, father of my child, my sometimes Dominant……my Fifty Shades.

Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson

I had no illusions about you,' he said. 'I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. It's comic when I think how hard I tried to be amused by the things that amused you and how anxious I was to hide from you that I wasn't ignorant and vulgar and scandal-mongering and stupid. I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew. I knew that you'd only married me for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn't care. Most people, as far as I can see, when they're in love with someone and the love isn't returned feel that they have a grievance. They grow angry and bitter. I wasn't like that. I never expected you to love me, I didn't see any reason that you should. I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you and I was enraptured when now and then I thought you were pleased with me or when I noticed in your eyes a gleam of good-humored affection. I tried not to bore you with my love; I knew I couldn't afford to do that and I was always on the lookout for the first sign that you were impatient with my affection. What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favor.

You should know this about the rich: they always want to get richer. It is never boring, getting your hands on more money.

There are good sailors. Well, some good sailors. In a way they are ideal as husbands. They drop in every six months for a wild celebration, then they drop out again before one gets bored with their company or annoyed with by their habits.

They're the perfect loving fam'ly, so adoring... And I love them ev'ry day of ev'ry week. So my son's a little shit, my husband's boring, And my daughter, though a genius, is a freak.

Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.

Who's this?" he said, coming across a name he didn't recognize. "Lady Georgina of Sandalhurst? Why are we inviting her? I don't know her. Why are we asking people we don't know?" I know her," Pauline replied. There was a certain steeliness in her voice that Halt would have done well to recognize. "She's my aunt, Bit of an old stick, really, but I have to invite her." You've never mentioned her before," Halt challenged. True. I don't like her very much. As I said, she's a bit of an old stick." Then why are we inviting her?" We're inviting her," Lady Pauline explained, "because Aunt Georgina has spent the last twenty years bemoaning the fact that I was unmarried. 'Poor Pauline!' she'd cry to anyone who'd listen. 'She'll be a lonley old maid! Married to her job! She'll never find a husband to look after her!' It's just too good an opportunity to miss." Halt's eyebrows came together in a frown. There might be a few things that would annoy him more than someone criticizing the woman he loved, but for a moment, he couldn't think of one. Agreed," he said. "And let's sit her with the most boring people possible at the wedding feast." Good thinking," Lady Pauline said. She made a note on another sheet of paper. "I'll make her the first person on the Bores' table." The Bores' table?" Halt said. "I'm not sure I've heard that term." Every wedding has to have a Bores' table," his fiance explained patiently. "We take all the boring, annoying, bombastic people and sit them together. That way they all bore each other and they don't bother the normal people we've asked." Wouldn't it be simpler to just ask the people you like?" Halt askede. "Except Aunt Georgina, of course--there's a good reason to ask her. But why ask others?" It's a family thing," Lady Pauline said, adding a second and third name to the Bores' table as she thought of them. "You have to ask family and every family has its share of annoying bores. It's just organizing a wedding.

Happiness is pretty boring, hard to take - in a word, a pain in the neck.

Katerina Lvovna lived a boring life in the rich house of her father-in-law during the five years of marriage to her unaffectionate husband; but, as often happens, no one paid the slightest attention to this boredom of hers.

All husbands are boring... No woman with ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.

Life is never boring when everyday I have weird, silly conversations with my husband that only us understand.

Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade.

She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders. 'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed.

They're bored with their boring husbands who are workaholics like my dad. They're bored with their boring lives, sick of us kids and all this puberty and rebelling, so they pop pills all day long and shop and watch the soaps, and then when it all starts to fall apart they realize they just want to be happy again, so they go to rehab to clean up their act and then start fresh. Can you relate?

Marya put down her fork. “Why are you doing this, Koschei? I have had lovers before. You have, too. Remember Marina? The rusalka? She and I swam together every morning. We raced the salmon. You called us your little sharks.” The Tsar of Life held his knife so tightly Marya could see his knucklebones bulging. “Were any of them called Ivan? Were any of them human boys all sticky with their own innocence? I know you. I know you because you are like me, as much like me as two spoons nested in each other.” Her husband leaned close to her, the candlelight sparking in his dark, shaggy hair. “When you steal them, they mean so much more, Marousha. Trust me. I know. What did I do wrong? Was I boring? Did I ignore you? Did I not give you enough pretty dresses? Enough emeralds? I’m sure I have more, somewhere.” Marya lifted her hand and laid it on her husband’s cheek. With a blinking quickness, she drove her nails deep into his face. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that. I have worn nothing but blood and death for years. I have fought all your battles for you, just as you asked me. I have learned all the tricks you said I must learn. I have learned not to cry when I strangle a man. I have learned to lay my finger aside my nose and disappear. I have learned to watch everything die. I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too. And if I have watched all my soldiers die in front of me, if I have only been saved by my rifle and my own hands, if I have drunk more blood than water for weeks, then I take the human boy who stumbled into my tent and hold him between my legs until I stop screaming, you will not punish me for it. Are we not chyerti? Are we not devils? I will not even hear your punishment, old man.

If/when I die, do not want Pam lonely. Want her to remarry, have full life. As long as new husband is nice guy. Gentle guy. Religious guy. Very caring + good to kids. But kids not fooled. Kids prefer dead dad (i.e., me) to religious guy. Pale, boring, religious guy, with no oomph, who wears weird sweaters and is always a little sad, due to, cannot get boner, due to physical ailment. Ha ha. Death very much on my mind tonight, future reader. Can it be true? That I will die? That Pam, kids will die? Is awful. Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like. Note to self: try harder, in all things, to be better person.

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked sublime and prophetic. One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe---a woman---had asked at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given an utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these: "I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both. "I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, brining a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place---then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement---and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

A former-girlfriend told me, “He has great respect for women. And a blatant disrespect and disregard for women. Not when he’s speaking to you, but in his actions. They’re not genuine. He’s not honest. He’s not a good husband. He gets bored easily. He’s not monogamous. He’s very controlling. And he’s not that sweet to them.

She waited for a man who would marvel her with his intellect, wit and physique, all at the same time. Someone who would beguile her, unnerve her, possess her, and claim her and then make her jealous with deceit and accusations. Someone who wouldn’t bore her after a few hours of company. Someone who wouldn’t be distracted by someone younger than her - even at that age, she had her insecurities........ She waited for a man who would be worth a chase and a challenge, who would beguile her and ravage her, and be true to her. She was no fool. She knew the limitations of affectation and ceremonial overtures between husband and wife. She knew the limits of compatibility, being put off by a few of her suitors instantly. She knew that love was not a guarantee to lifetime of happiness. She knew the importance of money and it’s effect on men. She knew the value of having the best in jewelry, clothes and company, for a person was judged accordingly, and if one wished to be a success, one had to look the part. And that required continuity of resources, not affection. But still she waited. She waited for a man who would surprise her beyond her expectations. She waited for a man who would be magical. She waited for a man who would never come.

Tina, finding herself and her husband on a sandbank, so to speak, between two classes, had gone to the artists. The artists do not mind if one is gentry or a common cad so long as one is neither a snob nor a bore

Adam’s mother ran the farm, bore Adam, and still had time to embrace a primitive theosophy. She felt that her husband would surely be killed by the wild and barbarous rebels, and she prepared herself to get in touch with him in what she called the beyond.

When we have made our love and gamed our gaming,   Drest, voted, shone, and maybe something more; With dandies dined, heard senators declaiming,   Seen beauties brought to market by the score, Sad rakes to sadder husbands chastely taming,   There’s little left but to be bored or bore. Witness those ci-devant jeunes hommes who stem The stream, nor leave the world which leaveth them.

Good God, the fellow's a dead bore!' 'He is, of course, but there's no saying he wouldn't be a good husband, for he is very kind, and honourable and -- and respectable, which I believe are excellent qualities in a husband.' 'No doubt! But not in *your* husband!

It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she'd stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like "spite." But it seemed to her that he'd asked her to do more than "one thing" while he was gone. He'd also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband's kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

you should know this about the rich: they always want to get richer. It is never boring, getting your hands on more money

You should know this about the rich: they always want to get richer. It's never boring, getting your hands on more money.

So when he dumped me- because he was bored with me, because he found someone else more exiting- I felt both a deep relief and a very real sense of failure.

So when he dumped me- because he was bored with me, because he found someone else more exciting- I felt both a deep relief and a very real sense of failure.

I see the people coming up from supper, and English men always get romantic after a meal, and that bores me dreadfully.

Rex was the kind of guy who was so beautiful it was nearly boring.

Husbands. People crazy enough to think that washing their boxers and cooking their food and listening to their boring rants for the rest of your life would make you happy.

All husbands are boring, John. No woman with an ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.

You persuade yourself that all is well even though you are feeling bored or unfulfilled and you are not sure if your husband or wife is your Soul mate. You have tried your best and you have created a pretty good life for yourself despite your circumstances. ‘At least you are safe’ your damaged self whispers. ‘At least no one suspects how wounded you are. In fact, I do not even think you are damaged anymore. Look at your nice home, your spouse, your career status, your wealth and all of your nice possessions. You are a success, you fool.

Letting go of my hand, he reached up to touch my face, thumb brushing across the line Vragi’s knife had left on my cheek. “Where is your husband?" What makes you think I’m wed?” I demanded, but he only turned and walked up the slope, ­toward a horse I hadn’t even been aware was tied to a tree. He pulled on a shirt before glancing back at me. “Your ring. Now, where might I find him?” Instinctively I tucked my hand, which bore a plain silver band, into the folds of my skirts. “Why do you wish to know where he is?” "Because I’m going to kill him. I’m going to make you a free woman so that you can bed me with no concerns for propriety,” he answered, tightening the girth before swinging onto the tall animal’s back. “What other reason could there be?

You should know this about the rich: they always want to get richer. It is never boring, getting your hands on more money. When I was a child, trying to find something to eat for dinner besides the old rice and dry beans in the kitchen, I would tell myself that if I could just have a good meal every night, I’d be happy. When I was at Sunset Studios, I told myself all I wanted was a mansion. When I got the mansion, I told myself all I wanted was two houses and a team of help. Here I was, just turned twenty-five, already realizing that no amount would ever really be enough.

Last thing I needed was a fling with some well-to-do, danger-seeking fangirl. She was probably just a bored housewife, looking for the kind of hard fuck she wasn’t getting from her uptight husband.

If there was ever evidence that Oliver was in a bad way, it was that not only was he still asleep with I woke up, but he was still asleep when I got bored of lying in bed-- which I thought was basically impossible.

When my mathematician husband is bored at parties, he sits quietly in a corner and does equations in his head. Only I know that he is no longer in the room. I can tell by his eyes and the contented look on his face.

He’d convinced himself that his wanting me was my fault. And I believed him. Look what I do to these poor boys, I thought. And yet also, Here is my value, my power. So when he dumped me—because he was bored with me, because he’d found someone else more exciting—I felt both a deep relief and a very real sense of failure. There was one other boy like that, whom I took my shirt off for because I thought I had to, before I started realizing that I could be the one doing the choosing. I didn’t want anyone; that was the problem. To be perfectly blunt, I’d started to figure my body out quickly. I didn’t need boys in order to feel good. And that realization gave me great power.

Then the voice - which identified itself as the prince of this world, the only being who really knows what happens on Earth - began to show him the people around him on the beach. The wonderful father who was busy packing things up and helping his children put on some warm clothes and who would love to have an affair with his secretary, but was terrified on his wife's response. His wife who would like to work and have her independence, but who was terrified of her husband's response. The children who behave themselves because they were terrified of being punished. The girl who was reading a book all on her own beneath the sunshade, pretending she didn't care, but inside was terrified of spending the rest of her life alone. The boy running around with a tennis racuqet , terrified of having to live up to his parents' expectations. The waiter serving tropical drinks to the rich customers and terrified that he could be sacket at any moment. The young girl who wanted to be a dance, but who was studying law instead because she was terrified of what the neighbours might say. The old man who didn't smoke or drink and said he felt much better for it, when in truth it was the terror of death what whispered in his ears like the wind. The married couple who ran by, splashing through the surf, with a smile on their face but with a terror in their hearts telling them that they would soon be old, boring and useless. The man with the suntan who swept up in his launch in front of everybody and waved and smiled, but was terrified because he could lose all his money from one moment to the next. The hotel owner, watching the whole idyllic scene from his office, trying to keep everyone happy and cheerful, urging his accountants to ever greater vigilance, and terrified because he knew that however honest he was government officials would still find mistakes in his accounts if they wanted to. There was terror in each and every one of the people on that beautiful beach and on that breathtakingly beautiful evening. Terror of being alone, terror of the darkness filling their imaginations with devils, terror of doing anything not in the manuals of good behaviour, terror of God's punishing any mistake, terror of trying and failing, terror of succeeding and having to live with the envy of other people, terror of loving and being rejected, terror of asking for a rise in salary, of accepting an invitation, of going somewhere new, of not being able to speak a foreign language, of not making the right impression, of growing old, of dying, of being pointed out because of one's defects, of not being pointed out because of one's merits, of not being noticed either for one's defects of one's merits.

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evils of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. I see that I hold sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both. I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place – then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement – and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Her husband’s family were not a lovely people, descendants of every kind of Floridian from original Timucua through Spanish and Scot and escaped slave and Seminole and carpetbagger; mostly they bore the look of overcooked Cracker.

She thought of the past that was both near and distant at the same time, undoubtedly because of the grim intrusion of the war. She pictured her husband, a heavy, bored man, interested only in money, land and local politics. She had never loved him; she had married him because her father wished it. Born and brought up in the countryside, she had little experience of the outside world, with the exception of a few brief trips to Paris to visit an elderly relative.

As an example, when Zeus is dallying with the nymph Io, Hera spots them, so he turns Io into a lovely white heifer. Hera, not fooled, seizes the cow and places her under the guard of a giant named Argus Panoptes (“All-Seeing”) because his body is covered with one hundred eyes (making him, quite literally, the first private eye called in by a wife to intervene in a case of adultery). Zeus sends in the god Hermes to tell him a boring, endless story, which gradually puts Argus to sleep, one eye at a time; then Hermes kills him and frees Io. Not done, Hera sends a gadfly to chase Io (an apt choice for hassling a cow), which stings her all the way to Egypt. Hera takes all of the eyes from Argus’ corpse and puts them on the tail of her favorite bird, the peacock. Take away the fanciful elements and the metamorphoses, and you have a classic story of an unfaithful husband confronted by an angry wife who tries to get even with the other woman.

The common female blue is indeed intolerable as a wife—opinionative and opinionated; and her opinion always is that her husband is wrong. John certainly has a rooted aversion to this whole class. There is the deep blue and the light; the light blues not esteemed—not admitted at Almacks. The deep-dyed in the nine times dyed blue—is that with which no man dares contend. The blue chatterer is seen and heard every where; it no man will attempt to silence by throwing the handkerchief.

They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.

Once or twice, in the first days of his marriage, he had asked himself with a slight shiver what would happen if Susy should begin to bore him. The thing had happened to him with other women as to whom his first emotions had not differed in intensity from those she inspired.

She had been invited to dinners and luncheons and dances, but their doings, she told Dirk, had bored her. “They’re nice,” she said, “but they don’t have much fun. They’re all trying to be something they’re not. And that’s such hard work. The women were always explaining that they lived in Chicago because their husband’s business was here. They all do things pretty well — dance or paint or ride or write or sing — but not well enough. They’re professional amateurs, trying to express something they don’t feel; or that they don’t feel strongly enough to make it worth while expressing.

And marriage, generally, requires an exquisite sense of timing. As a single person, time is relative to one’s needs and demands; as a married partner, time is a joint venture - the husband may be an hour late getting home, while dinner grows cold; the wife may be an hour late dressing for a party, while her mate grows hot under the collar. Time does not belong to us alone; we share it with those we love, those we work for, those we play with. It is an elastic concept: we must, as we grow older, be willing to be bored for someone else’s sake. And it can be as fatal to be stingy with our time as with our money.

The women stood there, nodding and pointing and making remarks, basting themselves in righteousness like geese on a spit, when just yesterday the first had slapped her small daughter so hard for spilling milk that the child’s cheek still bore a welt, and the second had kissed her sister’s husband behind the tavern.

He’d convinced himself that his wanting me was my fault. And I believed him. Look what I do to these poor boys, I thought. And yet also, Here is my value, my power. So when he dumped me—because he was bored with me, because he’d found someone else more exciting—I felt both a deep relief and a very real sense of failure.

Emotionally abusive men don't go on to have amazing relationships after you leave them. They tell the new wife the same lies about other people and exes that they told you. They use the same games and play the victim to get their way. After the honeymoon stage has worn off and there is nothing exciting to learn about his new love he will become bored. This is when he is back to the same pattern of abuse, which includes securing new narcissistic supply. That new wife will start to wonder why they can't have deep conversations. She will start to wonder why he gets so quick to anger. She will not understand why she is being abused. She will start back down the same road you took to reach his heart. It will be an emotional trip she won't understand because she was too stupid to believe that his long line of broken relationships were because of the women before her. Her arrogance will be her undoing because we both know she is in for the worst ride of her life!

He'd convinced himself that his wanting me was my fault. And I believed him. 'Look what I do to these poor boys,' I thought. And yet also, 'Here is my value, my power.' So when he dumped me – because he was bored with me, because he'd found someone else more exciting – I felt both a deep relief and a very real sense of failure.

Tessa reached out and took her hand. “Can I tell you something?” “As long as it’s not advice on chasing after a married man.” She squeezed Sara’s hand. “I’m really in love with my husband.” Sara gave a careful “Okay.” “I know you think Lem is boring and too earnest and too self-righteous, and believe me, he can be all those things, but a thousand times a day, I hear a song, or I think of something funny, or Daddy says one of his stupid puns, and the first thing that comes into my head is ‘I want to tell Lem about this.’ And I know that halfway around the world, he’s thinking the same thing.” She paused. “That’s what love is, Sara, when there are so many things about you that you only want one person in the world to know.

The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. Hitler made full use of “the society ladies thirsting for adventure, sick of their empty lives, no longer getting a ‘kick’ out of love affairs.”1 He was financed by the wives of some of the great industrialists long before their husbands had heard of him.2 Miriam Beard tells of a similar role played by bored wives of businessmen before the French Revolution: “they were devastated with boredom and given to fits of the vapors. Restlessly, they applauded innovators.

And it had all felt so grubby somehow, sneaking out of the house to meet a man at some tawdry inn. Bored wives who dallied with lovers whenever their husbands left town—was there anything more commonplace? Far better to dedicate yourself to books and writing, Marcella had decided, than to turn into a stale joke. Only now, books and writing were beginning to feel rather flat, too.

I apologize in advance.” He cocked his head to the side. “For?” “Ruining you for any other man on this planet. I’m going to fuck you, Indie. So hard you’ll think about me years from now, when you lie under your boring, missionary-loving husband. I will own every orgasm, every shiver, every wave of pleasure inside you. From here on out, it will be me. Just me. And for that, I truly am sorry.

Part of the freedom of being yourself is resisting the temptation to fill every minute with productivity, and allowing a little margin to be bored. I’m learning to practice stillness more regularly. To leave some room for sacred silence when I can. [My husband’s words to my kids in response to their perceived boredom] reminded me of my desire to learn how to be bored well. How to bring my nothing into the presence of Christ, and simply be with him. No agenda, no checklists, no accomplishing allowed. As it turns out, being bored can be super hard work. But it’s the very work of boredom that reminds me that I don’t, in fact, make the world go round. My agenda isn’t the most important one, and many times, may not be important at all. Knowing this is a great first step toward cultivating a lightness of heart.

I'll never stop wondering, you know. What could have been. If we'd stayed together, all those years ago. We might have come here to this villa, as husband and wife. With Sam. I might have had Sam as my son." "You might." "We might have had six children together." "Six! I'm not sure about that." "The worst things is... The worst thing is, we probably would have become discontented. After a few years. We probably would have lain here in the sun, feeling a little bored, wondering if we did the right thing in marrying each other. Not realizing how bloody lucky we were..." "It's late. We should get some rest." "We make so many decisions over a lifetime. Some turn out to be unimportant...and some turn out to be the key to everything. If only we knew their significance at the time. If only we knew what we were throwing away.

How could you do such a thing to your husband?" Toni looked at Melisande with shocked eyes. "Quite simply because he bored me. He agreed with everything I ever said, and not once in our four years together did he give me a bruise. He knelt to me when I wanted him to dominate me. He let me make a fool of him with a dozen men, but Luque was, on that point, a perfect Spaniard. He turned his back on me and so I stabbed him!

There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges, Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies. I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet, Because I think that is sort of sweet; No, I object to one kind of apology alone, Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own. You go to their house for a meal, And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal; They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests, And they apologize publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests; If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott, And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot; They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can, But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American. I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them, I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them, Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious, And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious, And what particularly bores me with them, Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them, So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf, Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.

Poor Mrs. Charles sat between her silent companions terrified at the course of events, and a little bored. She was a rubbishy little creature, and she knew it. A telegram had dragged her from Naples to the death-bed of a woman whom she had scarcely known. A word from her husband had plunged her into mourning. She desired to mourn inwardly as well, but she wished that Mrs. Wilcox, since fated to die, could have died before the marriage, for then less would have been expected of her.

Look you," Pandora told him in a businesslike tone, "marriage is not on the table." Look you? Look you? Gabriel was simultaneously amused and outraged. Was she really speaking to him as if he were an errand boy? "I've never wanted to marry," Pandora continued. "Anyone who knows me will tell you that. When I was little, I never liked the stories about princesses waiting to be rescued. I never wished on falling stars, or pulled the petals off daisies while reciting 'he loves me, he loves me not.' At my brother's wedding, they handed out slivers of wedding cake to all the unmarried girls and said if we put it under our pillows, we would dream of our future husbands. I ate my cake instead. Every crumb. I've made plans for my life that don't involve becoming anyone's wife." "What plans?" Gabriel asked. How could a girl of her position, with her looks, make plans that didn't include the possibility of marriage? "That's none of your business," she told him smartly. "Understood," Gabriel assured her. "There's just one thing I'd like to ask: What the bloody hell were you doing at the ball in the first place, if you don't want to marry?" "Because I thought it would be only slightly less boring than staying at home." "Anyone as opposed to marriage as you claim to be has no business taking part in the Season." "Not every girl who attends a ball wants to be Cinderella." "If it's grouse season," Gabriel pointed out acidly, "and you're keeping company with a flock of grouse on a grouse-moor, it's a bit disingenuous to ask a sportsman to pretend you're not a grouse." "Is that how men think of it? No wonder I hate balls." Pandora looked scornful. "I'm so sorry for intruding on your happy hunting grounds." "I wasn't wife-hunting," he snapped. "I'm no more interested in marrying than you are." "Then why were you at the ball?" "To see a fireworks display!" After a brief, electric silence, Pandora dropped her head swiftly. He saw her shoulders tremble, and for an alarming moment, he thought she had begun to cry. But then he heard a delicate snorting, snickering sound, and he realized she was... laughing? "Well," she muttered, "it seems you succeeded." Before Gabriel even realized what he was doing, he reached out to lift her chin with his fingers. She struggled to hold back her amusement, but it slipped out nonetheless. Droll, sneaky laughter, punctuated with vole-like squeaks, while sparks danced in her blue eyes like shy emerging stars. Her grin made him lightheaded. Damn it.

It is one of the great ironies of Mormon history that Smith, who set the polygamous movement in motion, never experienced it in practical terms. He was content to marry the teenage women who lived in his home and then let them depart when Emma objected. And he was content to let his polyandrous wives live with their first husbands, so he never bore the responsibility of providing for them, financially or emotionally, on a day-to-day basis. He never witnessed the toll practical polygamy would take on an Eliza Partridge...

I managed to have such a mediocre time at a place that is pretty much custom designed for delivering the best years of your life. I’d like to say that I wasn’t the same person back then that I later became and now am. But the truth is that I was the exact same person. I was more myself then than at any other time in my life. I was an extreme version of myself. Everything I’ve always felt I felt more intensely. Everything I’ve always wanted, I wanted more. Everything I currently dislike, I downright hated back then. People who think I’m judgmental, impatient, and obsessed with real estate now should have seen me in college. I was bored by many of my classmates and irked by the contrived mischief and floundering sexual intrigues of dormitory life. I couldn’t wait to get out and rent my own apartment, preferably one in a grand Edwardian building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In that sense, I guess my college experience was just as intense as my husband’s. I just view that intensity negatively rather than nostalgically, which perhaps is its own form of nostalgia.

Family is the chief metaphor that the Bible uses when it talks about the church. God is our Father. Jesus is our Husband. The Spirit is the Counselor to a redeemed, beloved, and often dysfunctional spiritual family. We are spiritual brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and daughters and sons to one another. We didn’t choose one another, but we have been given to one another by our Father in heaven, who intends for us to stay together and not hit the eject button when things get difficult or irritating or boring. And when we stay together, we are the better for it.

There's this party tomorrow night. The client with all the ex-husbands is throwing it, and I've got to go. I know it's last minute, and that Fridays are really busy for you. I'm also sure it's going to be boring. Anyway, if you can't go, I completely understand. But if you don't come with me, I'll be forced to meet rich, eligible bachelors who may or may not have all their original teeth and hair." I bit my nail as I waited for his answer, trying to prepare myself for the possibility he couldn't go. "You're not really giving me much of a choice," Jake said. "Not when I know you've got a weakness for bald men with dentures.

Carrie, Sheila, Sandy, Michael, my beloved husband and my family…I have been in a place for six incredible years where winning meant a crust of bread and to live another day. Since the blessed day of my liberation I have asked the question, ‘Why am I here? I am no better.’ In my mind’s eye I see those years and faces of those who never lived to see the magic of a boring evening at home. On their behalf I wish to thank you for honoring their memory, and you cannot do that in a better way than when you return to your homes tonight to realize that each of you who knows the joy of freedom are winners. Thank you on their behalf with all my heart.

I was mildly curious but clueless, and my husband—to—be and his friends were too hung—over to be of much help. They were mostly “lapsed” Catholics like my husband, the products of parochial schools in the 1950s and Jesuit colleges in the 1960s. They seemed vastly bored by the proceedings and had not gone forward to receive communion. But I watched the ceremony intently from far back in the big stone church. And at one point, I gasped. “Look,” I said, tugging on David’s sleeve. “Look at that! The priest is cleaning up! He’s doing the dishes!” My husband shrugged; others in the pew looked at me and then at him, as if to say—Dave, your girlfriend has gone soft in the head.

He was an only son, and he was born six months after his father was mustered into a Connecticut regiment in 1862. Adam’s mother ran the farm, bore Adam, and still had time to embrace a primitive theosophy. She felt that her husband would surely be killed by the wild and barbarous rebels, and she prepared herself to get in touch with him in what she called the beyond. He came home six weeks after Adam was born. His right leg was off at the knee. He stumped in on a crude wooden leg he himself had carved out of beechwood. And already it was splitting. He had in his pocket and placed on the parlor table the lead bullet they had given him to bite while they cut off his frayed leg.

I was hoping Betsy Nash would disappear. Literally. She was so insubstantial, I could imagine her slowly evaporating, leaving only a sticky spot on the edge of the sofa. But she lingered, eyes darting between me and her husband before we even began speaking. Like she was winding up for the conversation. The children, too, hovered about, little blonde ghosts trapped in a limbo between indolence and stupidity. The pretty girl might do all right. But the piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing. The boy was the type who’d end up drinking in gas-station parking lots. The kind of angry, bored kid I saw on my way into town.

These motives ranged from the mundane (“I was bored”) to the spiritual (“I wanted to get closer to God”), from altruistic (“I wanted my man to feel good about himself”) to vengeful (“I wanted to punish my husband for cheating on me”). Some women have sex to feel powerful, others to debase themselves. Some want to impress their friends; others want to harm their enemies (“I wanted to break up a rival’s relationship by having sex with her boyfriend”). Some express romantic love (“I wanted to become one with another person”); others express disturbing hate (“I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease”). But none of these reasons conveyed the “why” that hid behind each motive.

And so I didn't go, not even to see my sister . . that father of mine in the Austrian uniform did well not to come see me, now I finally understand myself, why I always carry that feeling of guilt... I assumed it from my mother and Francin and without actually being guilty of anything I bore that guilt, always and endlessly fleeing before that sense of wrongdoing, which was in me even before I was born .. and like I already told you, like Mr. Barthes says . . Although I forge ahead, I point to this mask of mine, which I wear like an actor who has decided to play the clown, the fool... so said my man, kneeling before me, washing my feet, and I knew that he was my husband and I was his wife ..

Risking a glance at the dignified young man beside her- what was his name?- Mr. Arthurson, Arterton?- Pandora decided to try her hand at some small talk. "It was very fine weather today, wasn't it?" she said. He set down his flatware and dabbed at both corners of his mouth with his napkin before replying. "Yes, quite fine." Encouraged, Pandora asked, "What kind of clouds do you like better- cumulus or stratocumulus?" He regarded her with a slight frown. After a long pause, he asked, "What is the difference?" "Well, cumulus are the fluffier, rounder clouds, like this heap of potatoes on my plate." Using her fork, Pandora spread, swirled, and dabbed the potatoes. "Stratocumulus are flatter and can form lines or waves- like this- and can either form a large mass or break into smaller pieces." He was expressionless as he watched her. "I prefer flat clouds that look like a blanket." "Altostratus?" Pandora asked in surprise, setting down her fork. "But those are the boring clouds. Why do you like them?" "They usually mean it's going to rain. I like rain." This showed promise of actually turning into a conversation. "I like to walk in the rain, too," Pandora exclaimed. "No, I don't like to walk in it. I like to stay in the house." After casting a disapproving glance at her plate, the man returned his attention to eating. Chastened, Pandora let out a noiseless sigh. Picking up her fork, she tried to inconspicuously push her potatoes into a proper heap again. Fact #64 Never sculpt your food to illustrate a point during small talk. Men don't like it. As Pandora looked up, she discovered Phoebe's gaze on her. She braced inwardly for a sarcastic remark. But Phoebe's voice was gentle as she spoke. "Henry and I once saw a cloud over the English Channel that was shaped in a perfect cylinder. It went on as far as the eye could see. Like someone had rolled up a great white carpet and set it in the sky." It was the first time Pandora had ever heard Phoebe mention her late husband's name. Tentatively, she asked, "Did you and he ever try to find shapes in the clouds?" "Oh, all the time. Henry was very clever- he could find dolphins, ships, elephants, and roosters. I could never see a shape until he pointed it out. But then it would appear as if by magic." Phoebe's gray eyes turned crystalline with infinite variations of tenderness and wistfulness. Although Pandora had experienced grief before, having lost both parents and a brother, she understood that this was a different kind of loss, a heavier weight of pain. Filled with compassion and sympathy, she dared to say, "He... he sounds like a lovely man." Phoebe smiled faintly, their gazes meeting in a moment of warm connection. "He was," she said. "Someday I'll tell you about him." And finally Pandora understood where a little small talk about the weather might lead.

SELKIE Alone, the cold body of the selkie man lay upon the sand, so like the drowned one the widow had called for. For her longing, he was hauled upon the sand, exposed to the moonlight. The selkie strained in fraught movements and human form broke from the gleaming seal fur. Undeniably he bore the image of the widow’s lost husband and spoke with the sounds of the dead man’s voice. She hailed back from the rocks. Shadows accumulating beyond the moon’s ability to reform. Colours were washed from sight and silver crashed through her, colder than snow dreams of being. In the dark, the ocean became the rolling flanks of a great beast drifting back across the horizon. Out deep soon, the land’s drop sharp.

Still, the limitations of what we can know, no matter how obsessed we are, have, inevitably, become clear to me. She walks ahead of me and I don't get to see her face. Was her hair brown or pale? Was she slim? Did she get heavier as she bore her children? Or was she petite, like a bird? What did her voice sound like? Did she argue with her husband? Did she like to cook? Was she as ambitious as I think she was? Would she have approved of my writing about her? But the closer I have drawn, the more she has receded, her figure diminishing, no matter how I strain to catch up. Those shores of early America are irretrievable, as is Anne. I have tried to retrieve her here, but some of the most important things are bound to be left unknown.

Twenty-Five Ways to Be a Good Listener        1. Be patient.        2. Don’t complete his sentences.        3. Let him finish, even if he seems to be rambling.        4. Don’t interrupt.        5. Face your husband and make eye contact.        6. Lean forward, if you are seated, to show you are interested.        7. Stop what you are doing.        8. Ask good questions and avoid the word “why.”        9. Ask his opinion about something that happened to you.      10. Ask him for his advice on a decision you have to make.      11. Don’t jump to conclusions.      12. Don’t give unsolicited advice.      13. Don’t change the subject until he is finished with a subject.      14. Make verbal responses such as, “I see,” “Really,” “Uh-huh,” to show you’re paying attention.      15. Turn off the TV.      16. Put down the dishcloth, book, hairbrush, etc.      17. Encourage him to tell you more. “What else did he say?” “What did she do next?”      18. When he is telling of a struggle, rephrase and repeat what you heard. “What I hear you saying is that you felt your boss was being unfair when he asked you to take on three more clients with no extra compensation.”      19. Let the telephone ring if he is in the middle of telling you something.      20. Don’t glance at your watch or cross your arms.      21. Don’t ask him to hurry.      22. If a child interrupts, tell him or her to wait until daddy is finished talking.      23. Don’t tell him how he should have handled the situation differently.      24. Don’t act bored.      25. Thank him for sharing with you.

Lotto began to smile and she saw he was her tiny image with her dimples and charm, she forgave him. A relief, to find her own beauty there. Her husband’s family were not a lovely people, descendants of every kind of Floridian from original Timucua through Spanish and Scot and escaped slave and Seminole and carpetbagger; mostly they bore the look of overcooked Cracker. Sallie was sharp-faced, bony. Gawain was hairy and huge and silent; it was a joke in Hamlin that he was only half human, the spawn of a bear that had waylaid his mother on her way to the outhouse. Antoinette had historically gone for the smooth and pomaded, the suave steppers, the loudly moneyed, but a year married, she found herself still so stirred by her husband that when he came in at night she followed him full-clothed into the shower as if in a trance.

When Camilla and her husband joined Prince Charles on a holiday in Turkey shortly before his polo accident, she didn’t complain just as she bore, through gritted teeth, Camilla’s regular invitations to Balmoral and Sandringham. When Charles flew to Italy last year on a sketching holiday, Diana’s friends noted that Camilla was staying at another villa a short drive away. On her return Mrs Parker-Bowles made it quite clear that any suggestion of impropriety was absurd. Her protestations of innocence brought a tight smile from the Princess. That changed to scarcely controlled anger during their summer holiday on board a Greek tycoon’s yacht. She quietly simmered as she heard her husband holding forth to dinner-party guests about the virtues of mistresses. Her mood was scarcely helped when, later that evening, she heard him chatting on the telephone to Camilla. They meet socially on occasion but, there is no love lost between these two women locked into an eternal triangle of rivalry. Diana calls her rival “the rotweiller” while Camilla refers to the Princess as that “ridiculous creature”. At social engagements they are at pains to avoid each other. Diana has developed a technique in public of locating Camilla as quickly as possible and then, depending on her mood, she watches Charles when he looks in her direction or simply evades her gaze. “It is a morbid game,” says a friend. Days before the Salisbury Cathedral spire appeal concert Diana knew that Camilla was going. She vented her frustration in conversations with friends so that on the day of the event the Princess was able to watch the eye contact between her husband and Camilla with quiet amusement. Last December all those years of pent-up emotion came flooding out at a memorial service for Leonora Knatchbull, the six-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Romsey, who tragically died of cancer. As Diana left the service, held at St James’s Palace, she was photographed in tears. She was weeping in sorrow but also in anger. Diana was upset that Camilla Parker Bowles who had only known the Romseys for a short time was also present at such an intimate family service. It was a point she made vigorously to her husband as they travelled back to Kensington Palace in their chauffeur-driven limousine. When they arrived at Kensington Palace the Princess felt so distressed that she ignored the staff Christmas party, which was then in full swing, and went to her sitting-room to recover her composure. Diplomatically, Peter Westmacott, the Wales’s deputy private secretary, sent her avuncular detective Ken Wharfe to help calm her.

Her problem was that she thought too much- “toxic thinking” and so forth- so she tried to stop, but a physical sensation of exertion remained. Was it her fault that her husband made more money? That it made more sense for her to quit her job than for him to quit his? Was it her fault that he was always gone, rendering her a de facto single mom for the majority of the week? Was it her fault that she found playing trains really, really boring? That she longed for even the smallest bit of mental stimulation, for a return to her piles of books, to her long-abandoned closet of half-formed projects, to one entire afternoon of solitude and silence? Was it her fault that, though she longed for mental stimulation, she still found herself unable to concoct a single, original thought or opinion? She did not actually care about anything anymore. Politics, art, philosophy, film: all boring. She craved gossip and reality TV. Was it her fault that she hated herself for her preference for reality TV? Was it her fault that she had bought into the popular societal myth that if a young woman merely secured a top-notch education she could then free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood, that if she simply had a career she could easily return to work after having a baby and sidestep the drudgery of previous generations, even though having a baby did not, in any way, represent a departure from work to which a woman might, theoretically, one day return. It actually, instead, marked an immersion in work, and unimaginable weight of work, a multiplication of work exponential in its scope, staggering, so staggering, both physically and psychically (especially psychically), that even the most mentally well person might be brought to her knees beneath such a load, a load that pitted ambition against biology, careerism against instinct, that bade the modern mother be less of an animal in order to be happy, because- come on, now- we’re evolved and civilized, and, really, what is your problem? Pull it together. This is embarrassing.

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both. "I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, brining a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place---then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement---and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

longer; it cannot deceive them too much." Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in confirmation. "As to you," said she, "you would shout and shed tears for anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?" "Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment." "If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?" "Truly yes, madame." "Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and were set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage, you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?" "It is true, madame." "You have seen both dolls and birds to-day," said Madame Defarge, with a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent; "now, go home!" XVI. Still Knitting Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the village—had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had—that when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares who could find a living there. Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well—thousands of acres of land—a whole province of France—all France itself—lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible

For members of a particular religious community, the sense of obligation takes a specific form when it comes to their commitment to each other. In the movie Shall We Dance?, Richard Gere plays a bored middle-aged attorney who surreptitiously takes up ballroom dancing. His wife, played by Susan Sarandon, becomes suspicious at his renewed energy and vitality. She hires a private detective, who discovers the dance studio and reports the news. She decides to let her husband continue dancing undisturbed. In the scene where she meets the private detective in a bar to pay his fee and end the investigation, they linger over a drink and discuss why people marry in the first place. The detective, whose countless investigations into infidelity have rendered him cynical about marriage, suggests that the desire to marry has something to do with hormones and passing fancy. She disagrees. The reason we marry, she insists, is that “we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet. . . . I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things . . . all of it, all of the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.’ ” The sacramental bond that unites two people in a marriage or committed relationship is known as a covenant. A covenant—the word means mutual agreement—is a promise to bear witness to the life of another: the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things. At its heart, the relationship among members of a religious community is covenantal as well. As with marriage, the relationship also includes other dimensions, such as friendship and perhaps financial and/or legal partnership. But the defining commitment that members of a religious community make to each other arises from their calling—their covenantal duty—to bear witness to each other’s lives: the lives they now lead and the lives they hope to lead in the future, and the world they now occupy and the world they hope to occupy in the future.

After a careful look up and down the corridor, James ushered Cordelia down the stairs. But their covert escape was not to be: Will appeared suddenly on the landing, in the midst of fixing his cuff links, and beamed with delight to see Cordelia. “My dear,” he said. “A pleasure to see you. Have you come from Cornwall Gardens? How is your mother?” “Oh, very well, thank you,” Cordelia said, then realized that if her mother really were in peak condition, she had little excuse for staying away from James and the Institute. “Well, she has been very tired, and of course we are all concerned that she get her energy back. Risa has been trying to build her back up again with many…soups.” Soups? Cordelia was not at all sure why she’d said that. Perhaps because her mother had always told her that ash-e jo, a sour barley soup, could cure anything. “Soups?” “Soups,” Cordelia said firmly. “Risa’s caretaking is very thorough, though of course, my mother wishes me to be by her side as much as possible. I have been reading to her—” “Oh, anything interesting? I’m always seeking a new book,” said Will, having finished with the cuff links. They were studded with yellow topaz. The color of James’s eyes. “Ah—no,” said Cordelia. “Only very boring things, really. Books about…ornithology.” Will’s eyebrows went up, but James had already thrown himself into the fray. “I really must get Cordelia back home,” he said, laying a hand on her back. It was an entirely ordinary husbandly gesture, not at all remarkable. It felt to Cordelia like being struck by lightning between her shoulder blades. “I’ll see you in a moment, Father.” “Well Cordelia, we all hope you’ll be back before too long,” Will said. “James is positively pining away without you here. Incomplete without his better half, eh, James?” He went away up the stairs and down the corridor, whistling. “Well,” said James after a long silence. “I thought, when I was ten years old and my father showed everyone the drawings I’d made of myself as Jonathan Shadowhunter, slaying a dragon, that was the most my parents would ever humiliate me. But that is no longer the case. There is a new champion.” “Your father is something of a romantic, that’s all.” “So you’ve noticed?

Eleanor was a member of one of America’s great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it’s surprising she survived her upbringing at all—one cousin called it “the grimmest childhood I had ever known.” Her father was an alcoholic who kept abandoning the family. One of her two brothers died when she was five years old, and her mother, who she remembered as “kindly and indifferent,” died when she was eight. Her father, who Eleanor worshiped despite his endless betrayals, died two years later. The orphan was sent to live with her grandmother, a stern woman with two alcoholic adult sons whose advances caused a teenage Eleanor to put three locks on her door. When she met Franklin, he was a student at Harvard and was known in the family as the not particularly impressive only son of a domineering widow. Eleanor got pregnant right after her wedding and spent the next ten years having six children and wriggling under her mother-in-law’s thumb. (“I was your real mother; Eleanor merely bore you,” Sara Roosevelt told her grandchildren.)

But I was thinking of Polly. If Boy was bored and lonely she was not likely to be very happy either. The success or failure of all human relationships lies in the atmosphere each person is aware of creating for the other, what atmosphere could a disillusioned Polly feel that she was creating for a bored and lonely Boy? Her charm, apart from her beauty, and husbands, we know, get accustomed to the beauty of their wives so that it ceases to strike them at the heart, her charm used to derive from the sphinx-like quality which came from her secret dream of Boy; in the early days of that dream coming true, at Alconleigh, happiness had made her irresistible. But I quite saw that with the riddle solved, and if the happiness were dissolved, Polly, without her own little daily round of Madame Rita, Debenhams and the hairdresser to occupy her, and too low in vitality to invent new interests for herself, might easily sink into sulky dumps. She was not at all likely to find consolation in Sicilian folk-lore, I knew, and probably not, not yet, anyhow, in Sicilian noblemen. 'Oh, dear,' I said. 'If Boy isn't happy I don't suppose Polly can be either. Oh, poor Polly.

Ione III. TO-DAY my skies are bare and ashen, And bend on me without a beam. Since love is held the master-passion, Its loss must be the pain supreme — And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream. But pardon, dear departed Guest, I will not rant, I will not rail; For good the grain must feel the flail; There are whom love has never blessed. I had and have a younger brother, One whom I loved and love to-day As never fond and doting mother Adored the babe who found its way From heavenly scenes into her day. Oh, he was full of youth's new wine, — A man on life's ascending slope, Flushed with ambition, full of hope; And every wish of his was mine. A kingly youth; the way before him Was thronged with victories to be won; so joyous, too, the heavens o'er him Were bright with an unchanging sun, — His days with rhyme were overrun. Toil had not taught him Nature's prose, Tears had not dimmed his brilliant eyes, And sorrow had not made him wise; His life was in the budding rose. I know not how I came to waken, Some instinct pricked my soul to sight; My heart by some vague thrill was shaken, — A thrill so true and yet so slight, I hardly deemed I read aright. As when a sleeper, ign'rant why, Not knowing what mysterious hand Has called him out of slumberland, Starts up to find some danger nigh. Love is a guest that comes, unbidden, But, having come, asserts his right; He will not be repressed nor hidden. And so my brother's dawning plight Became uncovered to my sight. Some sound-mote in his passing tone Caught in the meshes of my ear; Some little glance, a shade too dear, Betrayed the love he bore Ione. What could I do? He was my brother, And young, and full of hope and trust; I could not, dared not try to smother His flame, and turn his heart to dust. I knew how oft life gives a crust To starving men who cry for bread; But he was young, so few his days, He had not learned the great world's ways, Nor Disappointment's volumes read. However fair and rich the booty, I could not make his loss my gain. For love is dear, but dearer, duty, And here my way was clear and plain. I saw how I could save him pain. And so, with all my day grown dim, That this loved brother's sun might shine, I joined his suit, gave over mine, And sought Ione, to plead for him. I found her in an eastern bower, Where all day long the am'rous sun Lay by to woo a timid flower. This day his course was well-nigh run, But still with lingering art he spun Gold fancies on the shadowed wall. The vines waved soft and green above, And there where one might tell his love, I told my griefs — I told her all! I told her all, and as she hearkened, A tear-drop fell upon her dress. With grief her flushing brow was darkened; One sob that she could not repress Betrayed the depths of her distress. Upon her grief my sorrow fed, And I was bowed with unlived years, My heart swelled with a sea of tears, The tears my manhood could not shed. The world is Rome, and Fate is Nero, Disporting in the hour of doom. God made us men; times make the hero — But in that awful space of gloom I gave no thought but sorrow's room. All — all was dim within that bower, What time the sun divorced the day; And all the shadows, glooming gray, Proclaimed the sadness of the hour. She could not speak — no word was needed; Her look, half strength and half despair, Told me I had not vainly pleaded, That she would not ignore my prayer. And so she turned and left me there, And as she went, so passed my bliss; She loved me, I could not mistake — But for her own and my love's sake, Her womanhood could rise to this! My wounded heart fled swift to cover, And life at times seemed very drear. My brother proved an ardent lover — What had so young a man to fear? He wed Ione within the year. No shadow clouds her tranquil brow, Men speak her husband's name with pride, While she sits honored at his side —

And white-armed Andromache led the lament among them, holding in her arms the head of horse-breaking Hector: "My husband, you were lost from life while young, and are leaving me a widow in your halls; and the child is still just a baby, whom we bore, you and I, ill-fated both, nor do I think he will reach young manhood; before that this city will be wholly ravaged; for you its watchman have perished, who used to guard it, who protected its devoted wives and tender children. They soon will be carried away in the hollow ships, and I with them; and you then, my child, either you will follow with me, and there do work unworthy of you toiling for a harsh master-or some Achaean man seizing you by the arm will hurl you from the ramparts, unhappy death, in his anger, one whose brother, perhaps, Hector slew, or his father or even his son, since so many of the Achaeans gripped the broad earth in their teeth at Hector's hands. For your father was no gentle man in sad battle; therefore the people mourn him through the city, and cursed is the grief and lamentation you have laid upon your parents, Hector. And to me beyond all others will be left painful sorrow; for you did not reach out your hands to me from your bed as you were dying, nor did you speak some close word to me, which I might always remember through the nights and days as I shed my tears." So she spoke, crying, and the women in response mourned.

Why on earth didn’t you say in the papers what had happened to my brother? Obviously my husband and Mr. Delham knew it. And you must have known you could provide the captain and crew to prove it.” Reluctantly, the assistant tore his gaze from the bench and said softly, “It was your husband’s idea to wait until the trial was under way before springing his defense on them.” “But why?” “Because our illustrious prosecutor and his staff showed no sign of dropping the case no matter what we claimed. They believed their evidence was enough for a conviction, and if we’d told them about the Arianna, they’d have kept stalling for him to look for more evidence to disprove Captain Granthome’s potential testimony. Moreover, the Arianna and her crew were on a voyage, and we weren’t completely certain we could locate them and get them back here in time to testify. Now our frustrated Lord Prosecutor has nothing readily at hand to use as rebuttal, because he didn’t anticipate this. And if your brother is never seen again, there’s still no point in his digging about for more circumstantial, incriminating evidence, because even if he found it-which he won’t-your husband cannot be tried twice for the same crime.” Now Elizabeth understood why Ian had looked bored and disinterested, even though she still couldn’t comprehend why he’d never softened when she’d explained it was Robert she was with, not a lover, and offered the proof of Mrs. Hogan’s letter and even the promise of her testimony. “Your husband orchestrated the entire maneuver,” the assistant said, looking admiringly at Ian, who was being addressed by the Lord Chancellor. “Planned his own defense. Brilliant man, your husband. Oh, and by the by, Mr. Delham said to tell you that you were splendid up there.

Lady Thornton,” Sutherland said in an awful, silky voice that made Elizabeth shake inside, “does the word ‘perjury’ have any meaning to you?” “I believe,” Elizabeth said, “it means to tell a lie in a place like this.” “Do you know how the Crown punishes perjurers? They are sentenced to gaol, and they live their lives in a dark, dank cell. Would you want that to happen to you?” “It certainly doesn’t sound very agreeable,” Elizabeth said. “Would I be able to take my jewels and gowns?” Shouts of laughter shook the chandeliers that hung from the vaulted ceilings. “No, you would not!” “Then I’m certainly happy I haven’t lied.” Sutherland was no longer certain whether he’d been duped, but he sensed that he’d lost his effort to make Elizabeth sound like a clever, scheming adulteress or a terrified, intimidated wife. The bizarre story of her flight with her brother had now taken on a certain absurd credibility, and he realized it with a sinking heart and a furious glower. “Madam, would you perjure yourself to protect that man?” His arm swung toward Ian, and Elizabeth’s gaze followed helplessly. Her heart froze with terror when she saw that, if anything, Ian looked more bored, more coldly remote and unmoved than he had before. “I asked you,” Sutherland boomed, “if you would perjure yourself to save that man from going to the gallows next month.” Elizabeth would have died to save him. Tearing her gaze from Ian’s terrifying face, she pinned a blank smile on her face. “Next month? What a disagreeable thing to suggest! Why, next month is-is Lady Northam’s ball, and Kensington very specifically promised that we would go”-thunderous guffaws exploded, rocking the rafters, drowning out Elizabeth’s last words-“and that I could have a new fur!!” Elizabeth waited, sensing that she had succeeded, not because her performance had been so convincing, but because many of the lords and wives who never thought beyond the next gown or ball or fur, and so she seemed entirely believable to them. “No further questions!” Sutherland rapped out, casting a contemptuous glance over her. Peterson Delham slowly arose, and though his expression was carefully blank, even bemused, Elizabeth sensed rather than saw that he was silently applauding her. “Lady Thornton,” he said in formal tones, “is there anything else you have to say to this court?” She realized that he wanted her to say something else, and in her state of relieved exhaustion Elizabeth couldn’t think what it was. She said the only thing she could think of, and she knew soon after she began speaking that he was pleased. “Yes, my lord. I wish to say how very sorry I am for the bother Bobby and I have caused everyone. I was wrong to believe him and to dash off without a word to anyone. And it was wrong of him to remain so angry with my husband all this time over what was, after all, rather an act of kindness on his part.” She sensed that she was going too far, sounding too sensible, and she hastily added, “If Kensington had had Bobby tossed into gaol for trying to shoot him, I daresay Bobby would have found it nearly as disagreeable a place as I. He is,” she confided, “a very fastidious person!” “Lady Thornton!” the Lord Chancellor said when the fresh waves of laughter had diminished to ripples. “You may step down.” At the scathing tone in his voice, Elizabeth dared a look in his direction, and then she almost missed her step when she saw the furious scorn on his face. The other lords might think her an incorrigible henwit, but the Lord Chancellor looked as if he would personally have enjoyed throttling her.

My greetings and constant love to Emory and my grandchildren. I am well and continue to make my rounds with the news of the day and as always am well-received in the towns of which we have more than a few now as the Century grows older and the population increases so that large crowds come to hear reportage of distant places as well as those nearby. I enjoy good health as always and hope that Emory is doing well using his left hand now and look forward to an example of his handwriting. It is true what Elizabeth has said about employment for a one-armed man but that concerns manual labor only and at any rate there should be some consideration for a man who has lost a limb in the war. As soon as he is adept with his left I am sure he will consider Typesetting, Accounting, Etc. & Etc. Olympia is I am sure a steady rock to you all. Olympia’s husband, Mason, had been killed at Adairsville, during Johnston’s retreat toward Atlanta. The man was too big to be a human being and too small to be a locomotive. He had been shot out of the tower of the Bardsley mansion and when he fell three stories and struck the ground he probably made a hole big enough to bury a hog in. The Captain’s younger daughter, Olympia, was in reality a woman who affected helplessness and refinement and had never been able to pull a turnip from the garden without weeping over the poor, dear thing. She fluttered and gasped and incessantly tried to demonstrate how sensitive she was. Mason was a perfect foil and then the Yankees went and killed him. Olympia was now living with Elizabeth and Emory in the remains of their farm in New Hope Church, Georgia, and was quite likely a heavy weight. He put one hand to his forehead. My youngest daughter is in reality a bore. There was a pounding on the wall: Kep-dun! Kep-dun!

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out “I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. “I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both. I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice

Men traveling alone develop a romantic vertigo. Bech had already fallen in love with a freckled embassy wife in Russia, a buck-toothed chanteuse in Rumania, a stolid Mongolian sculptress in Kazakhstan. In the Tretyakov Gallery he had fallen in love with a recumbent statue, and at the Moscow Ballet School with an entire roomful of girls. Entering the room, he had been struck by the aroma, tenderly acrid, of young female sweat. Sixteen and seventeen, wearing patchy practice suits, the girls were twirling so strenuously their slippers were unraveling. Demure student faces crowned the unconscious insolence of their bodies. The room was doubled in depth by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Bech was seated on a bench at its base. Staring above his head, each girl watched herself with frowning eyes frozen, for an instant in the turn, by the imperious delay and snap of her head. Bech tried to remember the lines of Rilke that expressed it, this snap and delay: did not the drawing remain/that the dark stroke of your eyebrow/swiftly wrote on the wall of its own turning? At one point the teacher, a shapeless old Ukrainian lady with gold canines, a prima of the thirties, had arisen and cried something translated to Bech as, “No, no, the arms free, free!” And in demonstration she had executed a rapid series of pirouettes with such proud effortlessness that all the girls, standing this way and that like deer along the wall, had applauded. Bech had loved them for that. In all his loves, there was an urge to rescue—to rescue the girls from the slavery of their exertions, the statue from the cold grip of its own marble, the embassy wife from her boring and unctuous husband, the chanteuse from her nightly humiliation (she could not sing), the Mongolian from her stolid race. But the Bulgarian poetess presented herself to him as needing nothing, as being complete, poised, satisfied, achieved. He was aroused and curious and, the next day, inquired about her of the man with the vaguely contemptuous mouth of a hare—a novelist turned playwright and scenarist, who accompanied him to the Rila Monastery. “She lives to write,” the playwright said. “I do not think it is healthy.

Our story begins on a sweltering August night, in a sterile white room where a single fateful decision is made amid the mindless ravages of grief. But our story does not end there. It has not ended yet. Would I change the course of our lives if I could? Would I have spent my years plucking out tunes on a showboat, or turning the soil as a farmer’s wife, or waiting for a riverman to come home from work and settle in beside me at a cozy little fire? Would I trade the son I bore for a different son, for more children, for a daughter to comfort me in my old age? Would I give up the husbands I loved and buried, the music, the symphonies, the lights of Hollywood, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live far distant but have my eyes? I ponder this as I sit on the wooden bench, Judy’s hand in mine, the two of us quietly sharing yet another Sisters’ Day. Here in the gardens at Magnolia Manor, we’re able to have Sisters’ Day anytime we like. It is as easy as leaving my room, and walking to the next hall, and telling the attendant, “I believe I’ll take my dear friend Judy out for a little stroll. Oh yes, of course, I’ll be certain she’s delivered safely back to the Memory Care Unit. You know I always do.” Sometimes, my sister and I laugh over our clever ruse. “We’re really sisters, not friends,” I remind her. “But don’t tell them. It’s our secret.” “I won’t tell.” She smiles in her sweet way. “But sisters are friends as well. Sisters are special friends.” We recall our many Sisters’ Day adventures from years past, and she begs me to share what I remember of Queenie and Briny and our life on the river. I tell her of days and seasons with Camellia, and Lark, and Fern, and Gabion, and Silas, and Old Zede. I speak of quiet backwaters and rushing currents, the midsummer ballet of dragonflies and winter ice floes that allowed men to walk over water. Together, we travel the living river. We turn our faces to the sunlight and fly time and time again home to Kingdom Arcadia. Other days, my sister knows me not at all other than as a neighbor here in this old manor house. But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse. “Aren’t they so very sweet?

metastases has become talk of a few months left. When I saw her in A&E, despite obvious suspicions, I didn’t say the word ‘cancer’ – I was taught that if you say the word even in passing, that’s all a patient remembers. Doesn’t matter what else you do, utter the C-word just once and you’ve basically walked into the cubicle and said nothing but ‘cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer’ for half an hour. And not that you’d ever want a patient to have cancer of course, I really really didn’t want her to. Friendly, funny, chatty – despite the litres of fluid in her abdomen splinting her breathing – we were like two long-lost pals finding themselves next to each other at a bus stop and catching up on all our years apart. Her son has a place at med school, her daughter is at the same school my sister went to, she recognized my socks were Duchamp. I stuck in a Bonanno catheter to take off the fluid and admitted her to the ward for the day team to investigate. And now she’s telling me what they found. She bursts into tears, and out come all the ‘will never’s, the crushing realization that ‘forever’ is just a word on the front of Valentine’s cards. Her son will qualify from medical school – she won’t be there. Her daughter will get married – she won’t be able to help with the table plan or throw confetti. She’ll never meet her grandchildren. Her husband will never get over it. ‘He doesn’t even know how to work the thermostat!’ She laughs, so I laugh. I really don’t know what to say. I want to lie and tell her everything’s going to be fine, but we both know that it won’t. I hug her. I’ve never hugged a patient before – in fact, I think I’ve only hugged a grand total of five people, and one of my parents isn’t on that list – but I don’t know what else to do. We talk about boring practical things, rational concerns, irrational concerns, and I can see from her eyes it’s helping her. It suddenly strikes me that I’m almost certainly the first person she’s opened up to about all this, the only one she’s been totally honest with. It’s a strange privilege, an honour I didn’t ask for. The other thing I realize is that none of her many, many concerns are about herself; it’s all about the kids, her husband, her sister, her friends. Maybe that’s the definition of a good person.

Noah smiled at her, then his smile froze. He looked her slowly up and down. And again. “What?” she demanded hotly, hands on her hips. “Nothing,” he said, turning away. “No. What? What’s the matter?” He turned back slowly, put his tools down on top of the ladder and approached her. “I don’t know how to say this. I think it would be in the best interests of both of us if you’d dress a little more…conservatively.” She looked down at herself. “More conservatively than overalls?” she asked. He felt a laugh escape in spite of himself. He shook his head. “Ellie, I’ve never seen anybody look that good in overalls before.” “And this is a bad thing?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s provocative,” he tried to explain. “Sexy. People who work around churches usually dress a little more… What’s the best way to put this…?” “Frumpy? Dumpy? Ugly?” “Without some of their bra showing, for one thing.” “Well now, Reverend, just where have you been? Because this happens to be in style. And I’ll do any work you give me, but you really shouldn’t be telling me what to wear. The last guy I was with tried to do me over. He liked me well enough when he was trying to get my attention, but the second I married him, he wanted to cover me up so no one would notice I had a body!” “The husband?” “The very same. It didn’t work for him and it’s not going to work for you. You didn’t say anything about a dress code. Maybe I’ll turn you in to the Better Business Bureau or something.” “I think you mean the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Or maybe you should go straight to the American Civil Liberties Union.” He stepped toward her. “Ellie,” he said, using his tender but firm minister voice. “I’m a single man. You’re a very beautiful young woman. I would like it if the good people of Virgin River assumed you were given this job solely because of your qualifications and not because you’re eye candy. Tomorrow, could you please wear something less distracting?” “I’ll do my best,” she said in a huff. “But this is what I have, and there’s not much I can do about that. Especially on what you’re paying me.” “Just think ‘baggy,’” he advised. “We’re going to have a problem there,” she said. “I don’t buy my clothes baggy. Or ugly. Or dumpy. And you can bet your sweet a…butt I left behind the clothes Arnie thought I should wear.” She just shook her head in disgust. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You know how many guys would rather have something nice to look at than a girl in a flour sack? Guess you didn’t get to Count Your Blessings 101.” She cocked her head and lifted her eyebrows. “I’m counting,” he said. But his eyes bore down on hers seriously. He was not giving an inch. “Just an ounce of discretion. Do what you can.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s just get to work. Tomorrow I’ll look as awful as possible. How’s that?” “Perfect.

A woman paralyzed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd inconsequential incidents. It is, in fact, time to start dating again. But Dan has no idea what that means for a gay man well into his thirties who has neither money nor abs. - if you’re delivering a song, there are instances when the veil of the ordinary falls away and you are, fleetingly, a supernatural being, with music rampaging through you and soaring out into a crowd. You connect, you’re giving it, you’re the living sweat-slicked manifestation of music itself, the crowd feels it as piercingly as you do. Always, almost always, you “spot a girl. She doesn’t need to be pretty. She’s the love of somebody’s life (you hope she is), and for those few seconds she’s the love of yours, you’re singing to her and she’s singing back to you, by raising her arms over her head and swinging her hips, adoring you or, rather, adoring some being who is you and the song combined, able to touch her everywhere. It’s the briefest of love affairs. - Isabel is embarrassed about her sadness. She’s embarrassed about being embarrassed about her sadness, she who has love and money. She tries looking discreetly into her bag for a Kleenex, without anything that could be called frantic rummaging. She ponders the prospect that decadent unhappiness might, in its way, be worse than genuine, legitimate despair. Which is, as she knows, a decadent question to pose at all. - members of a biological aristocracy - Dan is taken by a tremor of scorn twisted up with painful affection, as if they were two names for the same emotion - but that’s my narcissism speaking ive been working on the idea that there are other people in the world - Beyond lust there’s a purity, you know? Does it ever get to be too late? If neither of you abuses the dog (should they finally get a dog?) or leaves the children in the car on a hot day. Does it ever become irreparable? If so, when? How do you, how does any“one, know when they cross over from working through this to it’s too late? Is there (she suspects there must be) an interlude during which you’re so bored or disappointed or ambushed by regret that it is, truly, too late? Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again? Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods? Most mothers think their children are amazing and singular people. Most mothers are wrong about that. You’re beautiful in your own skin. You brought with you into the world some kind of human amazingness, and you can depend on it, always. Please try not to ever let anybody talk you out of that. She says, “You’re not in love with me.” “Trust me. I’ve had a lot of experience at not being in love with people. I’ve been not in love with pretty much everybody, all my life.” She wonders how many women think more kindly and, all right, more lustfully toward their husbands after they’ve left them. Maybe someone’s done a study. “If you’re determined to be insulted.

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

Not liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stockings out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet. It didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame—who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way with him, his truthfulness—for instance at dinner she had been thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking, There is something I want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words they had said at dinner, "the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee," began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed; so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book. And all the lives we ever lived And all the lives to be, Are full of trees and changing leaves, she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so, she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her—her husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it—if not he, then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.