Elizabeth von Arnim: "Vera"
==========================
London: Hesperus Press, 2015

p.5:

And ever since she [Lucy] could remember he [her father] had been
everything in life to her. She had had no thought since she grew up for
anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so
completely did he fill her heart.


p.42:

How dreadful thoughts could be, Lucy said to herself, overcome that such
a one at such a moment should thrust itself into her mind. Hateful of
her, hateful ... [NP] She hung her head in shame; ...


p.43:

[NP] She hung on to the gate while her thoughts flew about in confusion
within her. These kisses -- and his [Wemyss's] wife just dead -- and dead
so terribly -- how long would she have to stand there with this going on
- ...


p.45:

How could he [Wemyss] be happy, as happy as that all in a moment? She
[Lucy] stared at him, and even through her confusion, her bewilderment,
she was frankly amazed. [NP] Then the thought crept into her mind that
it was she who had done this, it was she who had transformed him, ...


p.47:

But what worried her was that Everard -- Wemyss's Christian name was
Everard -- should be able to think of such things as love and more
marriage when his wife [Vera] had just died so awfully, and he on the
very spot, and she the first to rush out and see ... [dots in original]

[NP] She found that the moment she was away from him she couldn't get
over this. It went round and round in her head as a thing she was
unable, by herself, to understand. While she was with him he overpowered
her into a torpor, into a shutting of her eyes and her thoughts, into
just giving herself up, after the shocks and agonies of the week, to the
blessedness of a soothed and caressed semi-consciousness; and it was
only when his first letters began to come, such simple, adoring letters,
taking the situation just as it was, just as life and death between them
had offered it, untroubled by questioning, undimmed by doubt, with no
looking backward but with a touching, thankful acceptance of the
present, that she gradually settled down into that placidity which was
at once the relief and the astonishment of her aunt.


p.76:

[NP] He [Wemyss] didn't tell Lucy he was coming, he just came. It had
taken him five Thursday evenings of playing bridge as usual at his club,
playing it with one hand, as he said to her afterwards, and thinking of
her with the other -- `You know what I mean,' he said, and they laughed
and embraced -- before it slowly oozed into and pervaded his mind that
there was his little girl, rounded by people fussing over her and making
love to her (...), and there was he, the only person who had a right to
do this, somewhere else. [EP]


p.101 [Lucy's thoughts while on honeymoon in Paris]

[NP] But -- there in England waiting for her, inevitable, no longer to
be put off or avoided, was The Willows [her husband Wemyss's house,
where his first wife Vera died]. Whenever her thoughts reached that
house they gave a little jump and tried to slink away. She was ashamed
of herself, it was ridiculous, ... ...; yet she failed to see herself in
The Willows, she failed altogether to imagine it. ... [H]ow was she
going to have tea on the very flags perhaps where ... [dots in original;
the flagstones are where Vera fell to her death] Her thoughts slunk
away; but not before one of them had sent a curdling whisper through her
mind, `_The tea would taste of blood._'

[NP] Well, this was sleeplessness. She never in her life had had that
sort of absurd thought. It was just that she didn't sleep, and so her
brain was relaxed and let the reins of her thinking go slack.


p.105:

[NP] What had she said, Lucy hurriedly asked herself, nipping over her
last words in her mind, for she had learned by now what [p.106:] he
looked like when he was hurt.


p.108:

[During Lucy's engagement, before marriage, thinking very happily about
marriage:]  She felt quite sorry she had nothing in her mind in
the way of thoughts she was ashamed of to tell him then and there, but
there wasn't a doubt, there wasn't a shred of anything a little wrong,
not even an unworthy suspicion. Her mind was a chalice filled only with
love, and so clear and bright was the love that even at the bottom, when
she stirred it up to look, there wasn't a trace of sediment.

[NP] But marriage -- or was it sleeplessness? -- completely changed this,
and there were perfect crowds of thoughts in her mind that she was
thoroughly ashamed of.


p.109: 

She soon learned that a doubt in her mind was better kept there. If she
brought it out to air it and dispel it by talking it over with him, all
that happened was that he was hurt ...


p.117:

[NP] That particular one of his voices [a hurt voice] always by now made
her start, for it always took her by surprise. Pick her way as carefully
as she might among his feelings there were always some, apparently, that
she hadn't dreamed were there and that she accordingly knocked against.


p.118:

[NP] Implicit in her kiss was an appeal not to let anything she said or
did spoil his birthday, to forgive her, to understand. and at the back
of her mind, quite uncontrollable, quite unauthorised, ran beneath these
other thoughts this thought: `I am certainly abject.' [EP].


p.136:

[NP] Lucy stared at them [the books], thinking all this so as not to
think other things,. What she wanted to shut out was the wind sobbing up
and down that terrace behind her, and the consciousness of the fierce
intermittent squalls of rain beating on its flags, and the certainty
that upstairs ... [dots in original] Had Everard _no_ imagination, she
thought, with a sudden flare of rebellion, that he should expect her to
use and to like using the very sitting room where Vera --

[NP] With a quick shiver she grabbed at her thoughts and caught them
just in time. [EP]


p.137:

[NP] Lucy made a violent lunge after her thoughts [about Vera falling
out of the window] and strangled them. [EP]


p.138:

`... Come and look at yourself in the glass. Come and see how small you
are compared to the other things in the room. [p.139:] And with his arms
round her shoulders he led her to the dressing table.

[NP] `The other things?' laughed Lucy; but like a flame the thought was
leaping in her brain, `Now what shall I do if when I look into this I
don't see myself but Vera? It's _accustomed_ to Vera ... [dots in
original]'. [EP]


p.146:

[NP] For an instant she had an impulse to cry out and beat on the door,
...; but she was stopped by a sudden new wisdom. It shuddered down on
her heart, a wisdom she had never known or needed before, and held her
quiet.


p.147:

[Lucy is climbing the stairs, with effort.] For years and years, panted
Lucy -- her very thoughts came in gasps -- Vera lived up here winter
after winter ... If _only, only_ Vera weren't dead! But her mind lived
on -- her mind was in that room, in every littlest thing in it --

[NP] Lucy stumbled up the last few stairs completely out of breath, and
opening the sitting-room door stood panting on the threshold, ...


p.153:

[NP] Lizzie [a maid] went. ... She went; and Lucy stood where she had
left her, staring at the floor, dropping back into her quite new set of
astonished, painful thoughts. [EP]


p.208:

[NP] The moment, then, that Wemyss found himself once more doing the
usual things among the usual surroundings, he felt so exactly as he used
to that he wouldn't have remembered Lucy at all if it hadn't been for
that layer of indignation at the bottom of his mind. Going up the steps
of his club he was conscious of a sense of hard usage, and searching for
its cause remembered Lucy.


p.209:

[NP] [The servant] Twite's brain didn't work very fast owing to the way
it spent most of its time dormant in a basement, ...


p.228:

[NP] And this -- an absurd German thing Jim used to quote and laugh at:

  [a German rhyming couplet]

[NP] Why should a thing like that rise now to the surface of her mind
and float round on it, while all the noble verse she had read and
enjoyed, which should have been of such use and support to her at this
juncture, was nowhere to be found, not a shred of it, in any corner of
her brain?

[NP] What a brain, thought Miss Entwhistle, disgusted, ..., her eyes
shut; what a contemptible, anaemic brain, deserting her like this, only
able to throw up to the surface when stirred, out of all the store of
splendid stuff put so assiduously into it during years and years of
life, couplets.

  [two paragraphs]

[NP] ... A last couplet floated through her brain -- her brain seemed to
clutch at it:

  [English couplet]

[NP] Now where did that come from? she asked herself distractedly, ...