“She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstacy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in worship.”

“The tall white lillies were reeling in the moonlight, and the air was charged with perfume, as with a presence. Mrs. Morel gasped slightly in fear. She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. The she drank a deep draught of the scent. It almost made her dizzy.”

“He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body and not him. All his strength and energy she drew into herself through some channel which united them. She did not want to meet him so that there were two of them man and woman together. She wanted to draw all of him into her. It urged him to an intensity like madness which fascinated him as drug-taking might. He was discussing Michael Angelo. It felt to her as if she were fingering the very quivering tissue the very protoplasm of life as she heard him. It gave her deepest satisfaction. And in the end it frightened her. There he lay in the white intensity of his search and his voice gradually filled her with fear so level it was almost inhuman as if in a trance.”

“In the inner dark she saw a handsome bay horse with his clean earspricked like daggers from his naked head as he swung handsomely roundto stare at the open doorway. He had big, black, brilliant eyes, with asharp questioning glint, and that air of tense, alert quietness which betraysan animal that can be dangerous... He was of such a lovely red-goldcolour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him .. .She looked at the glowing bay horse, that stood there with his ears back,his face averted, but attending as if he were some lightning conductor. Hewas a stallion . ..Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understandingseemed to flood in . . . For some reason the sight of him, his power, his alive,alert intensity, his unyieldingness, made her want to cry. She never didcry ... But now, as if that mysterious fire of the horse's body had split somerock in her, she went home and hid herself in her room, and just cried. Thewild, brilliant, alert head of St Mawr seemed to look at her out of anotherworld. It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her own world hadsuddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of whichthe large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question,while his naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of hisinhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power.What was it? Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of theeverlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing,fearsome eyes, arched with a question, and containing a white blade oflight like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncannythreat? She didn't know. He was some splendid demon, and she mustworship him. (St Mawr)”

“Vaguely she knew herself that she was going to pieces in some way. Vaguely she knew she was out of connection: she had lost touch with the substantial and vital world. Only Clifford and his books, which did not exist... which had nothing in them. Void to void. Vaguely she knew. But it was like beating her head against a stone.”

“Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact!”

“She came upon a bankside of lavender crocuses. The sun was on them for the moment, and they were opened flat, great five-pointed, seven-pointed lilac stars, with burning centres, burning with a strange lavender flame, as she had seen some metal burn lilac-flamed in the laboratory of the hospital at Islington. All down and oak-dry bankside they burned their great exposed stars. And she felt like going down on her knees and bending her forehead to the earth in an oriental submission, they were so royal, so lovely, so supreme. She came again to them in the morning, when the sky was grey, and they were closed, sharp clubs, wonderfully fragile on their stems of sap, among leaves and old grass and wild periwinkle. They had wonderful dark stripes running up their cheeks, the crocuses, like the clear proud stripes on a badger’s face, or on some proud cat. She took a handful of the sappy, shut, striped flames. In her room they opened into a grand bowl of lilac fire.”