Explore "Love" by Elizabeth Von Arnim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There was a note of urgency in the telegram that made Catherine afraid. Going down in the slow afternoon train, the first she could catch, which stopped so often and so long, she had much time to think, and it seemed to her that all this she had been doing since her marriage was curiously shabby and disgraceful. What waste of emotions, what mean fears. Now came real fear, and at its touch those others shrivelled up. Virginia down there at grips with danger, being tortured -- oh, she knew what torture -- just this stark fact shocked her back to vision.
She sat looking out of the window at the fields monotonously passing, and many sharp-edged thoughts cut through her mind, and one of them was of the last time she had gone down to Chickover, and of her gaiety because some strange man, taken in by the cleverness with which Maria Rome had disguised her, had obviously considered her younger than she was. How pitiful, how pitiful; what a sign one was indeed old when a thing like that could excite one and make one feel pleased.