“... A wet night. They are going home together under an umbrella. They stop on the door to press their wet cheeks together.”

“Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.”

“I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.”

“We might be fifty, we might be five,So snug, so compact, so wise are we!Under the kitchen-table legMy knee is pressing against his knee.”

“When we reached home your cheeks were like roses, and your eyes were shining like stars, and you tried to tell Mummy so much in one breath that I thought you would burst.”

“Light as feathers the witches fly,The horn of the moon is plain to see;By a firefly under a jonquil flowerA goblin toasts a bumble-bee.”

“Don’t you think the stairs are a good place for reading letters? I do. One is somehow suspended. One is on neutral ground - not in one’s own world nor in a strange one. They are an almost perfect meeting place. Oh Heavens! How stairs do fascinate me when I think of it. Waiting for people - sitting on strange stairs - hearing steps far above, watching the light playing by itself - hearing - far below a door, looking down into a kind of dim brightness, watching someone come up. But I could go on forever. Must put them in a story though! People come out of themselves on stairs - they issue forth, unprotected.”