I thought of the youth with the teddy-bear under
the
chanel bags sale flowering
chestnuts. ‘It’s not what one would have foretold,’ I said. ‘I suppose he
doesn’t suffer?’ ‘Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the
suffering may be, to be maimed as he is - no dignity, no power of will. No one
is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him...I’ve seen so
much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much coming for everybody soon.
It’s the spring of love...’ and then in condescension to my
chanel
bags paganism, she added: ‘He’s in a very beautiful place you know
by the sea - white cloisters, a bell tower, rows of green vegetables, and a monk
watering them when the sun is low.’
I laughed. ‘You knew I wouldn’t
understand?’
‘You and Julia...’ she said. And then, as we moved on
towards the house, ‘When you met me last night did you think, “Poor Cordelia,
such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good
works”? Did you think “thwarted”?’ It was
chanel bags no time for
prevarication. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I did; I don’t now, so much.’ ‘It’s funny,’ she
said, ‘that’s exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up
in the nursery with nanny. “Thwarted passion,” I thought.’ She spoke with that
gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which descended to her from her
mother, but later that evening the words came back to me poignantly.
Julia wore the embroidered Chinese robe which she often used when we were dining
alone at Brideshead;
chanel handbags it was a robe
whose weight and stiff folds stressed her repose; her neck rose exquisitely from
the plain gold circle at her throat; her hands lay still among the dragons in
her lap. It was thus that I had rejoiced to see her nights without number, and
that night, watching her as she sat between the firelight and the shaded lamp,
unable to look away for love of her beauty, I suddenly thought, ‘When else have
I seen her like this? Why am I
chanel bags reminded of another
moment of vision?’ And it came back to me that this was how she had sat in the
liner, before the storm; this was how she had looked, and I realized that s he
had regained what I thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had
drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, ‘Surely I was made
for some other purpose than this?’