Best Of Dorothy Whipple's "High Wages"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from High Wages by Dorothy Whipple.
Pages numbers unknown for this one as I read it on my e-reader.
"There was almost no one about. It was a moment. Jane sometimes had these moments. She stood still in them."
Amusing:
"She wished, for the hundredth time, that her name was Gladys."
"He gave in to her, but not without irritation. He felt he could not cope with her ideas. Youth and enthusiasm can be fatiguing to those who have lost both. Mr. Chadwick, however, had enough shrewdness to know that, though her ideas made him tired, they were nevertheless good ideas. So he left her to it."
Decor notes from 1913:
"He liked to hang up specially sumptuous eiderdowns and cram his windows with embroidered covers of every conceivable kind; covers for beds, cushions, tables, chairs, sideboards, brushes-and-combs, night-gowns. Everything was covered in 1913; it was a discreet age."
"It was awful to have no one belonging to you, and to belong to no one."
"‘Oh, well,’ sighed Jane, rising from the protesting bed, ‘it makes no odds.’ This queer phrase, picked up from somewhere, was her favourite answer to Fate. She flung it out, as needed, in defiance, or resignation, or bitterness."
"Strange how she went through her life, hardly thinking of Noel Yarde, and yet whenever she came into contact with him, she was aware of a curious sympathy; of a feeling that, in some inner consciousness, she knew him intimately."
"‘D’you know,’ said Jane, ‘I find the greatest pleasure in just walking about and not being known.‘ He agreed heartily that it was one of the worst features of provincial life. You were so known."
"They talked, but over and over again they found themselves falling silent—coming suddenly into the deep secret consciousness they had of each other."
Love that - 'radiant isolation':
"‘What about those Dacre shares?’ he asked brusquely, to shatter their radiant isolation."
"She came away enfevered, rather than allayed."
"Love, although they were apart, grew like a living thing between them, feeding on dreams and thoughts."
"It must be all or nothing in love. And since it could not be all, it was nothing."
