But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterward.

He felt uncomfortable and afraid that any minute a gamekeeper or a posse of citizens would come over the bank from the town.

There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.

Any time you show me one that doesn’t want to get down off the cross when the time comes⁠—when the time comes, I mean⁠—I’ll climb right up with him.

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get any medals.

We were lying on blankets spread over straw and when he moved the straw was noisy, but the silkworms were not frightened by any noise we made and ate on steadily.

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again⁠—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright.

She had seemed much younger, in fact, she had seemed not to have any age at all, when Elliot had married her after several weeks of making love to her, after knowing her for a long time in her tea shop before he had kissed her one evening.

The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard⁠—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.

In 1919 he was traveling on the railroads in Italy, carrying a square of oilcloth from the headquarters of the party written in indelible pencil and saying here was a comrade who had suffered very much under the Whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid him in any way.

So her room was abandoned to insensitive guests, and they dressed and slept in her husband’s chamber, which Gloria considered somehow “good,” as though Anthony’s presence there had acted as exterminator of any uneasy shadows of the past that might have hovered about its walls.

His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne forest and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”⁠—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.