Explore "The Caravaners" by Elizabeth Von Arnim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Life is a strange thing, and full of surprises. The day before, you think you know what will happen on the morrow, and on the morrow you find you did not. Light as you may the candle of your common sense, and peer as you may by its shining into the future, if you see anything at all it turns out to have been, after all, something else. We are surrounded by tricks, by illusions, by fluidities. Even when the natural world behaves pretty much as experience has led us to expect, the unnatural world, by which I mean (and I say it is a fair description) human beings, does nothing of the sort. My ripe conclusion, carefully weighed and unattackably mellow, is that all one's study, all one's thought, all one's experience, all one's philosophy, lead to this: that you cannot account for anything. Do you, my friends, interrupt me here with a query? My answer to it is: Wait.
The morning after the occurrences just described I overslept myself, and on emerging about ten o'clock in search of what I hoped would still be breakfast I found the table tidily set out, the stove alight, and keeping coffee warm, ham in slices on a dish, three eggs waiting to be transferred to an expectant saucepan, and not a single caravaner in sight except Menzies-Legh.