It is terrible to be alone

Each of the hundred bedrooms with their shuttered windows might have held a corpse, rotting in humidity beneath the glacial swathings of the bed. In the lounge, a mist perpetually filmed the mirrors, the wicker armchairs gathering sociably around the glass-topped tables creaked at one another in the silence, so that now and then an apprehensive human head would bob up from over a writing table or the back of a settee. The rain was always audible on the glass roof of the verandah.

It is terrible to be alone in the darkness of rain, swept aside by one’s world’s indifference into a corner of a house. It is still more terrible to be swept aside into a corner of a continent.

Elizabeth Bowen
Salon des Dames