fear

“On her way back across the campus she did not find anything particular in her mind to identify this evening beyond others marked in other ways. There was a strong feeling of triumph and an odd feeling of vengeance, and once when she stopped under a tree and leaned her head against its firm rough trunk she whispered softly, ‘I know, I know.’ But that was all; beyond that she seemed to have nothing to say to herself.”

“‘I was thinking about when I would be dead,’ Natalie said.

“Natalie, looking at them with a frank stare possible only because they were both looking at Arthur and for the moment ignoring both herself and Elizabeth, saw with the irritation she was beginning to know as jealousy that they were both lovely, in the way that Elizabeth Langdon was lovely: the rounded, colorful, rich beauty of girls who have been pretty babies and pretty little girls and pretty boarding school girls and who have, at last, in college, reached a fulfillment of prettiness because they are finally nubile; that their loveliness would be deadened as Elizabeth’s had been deadened was not more than a small consolation to Natalie; that this loveliness built and recharged with an awareness of loveliness, and almost certainly masked vacant stupidity, was no consolation at all. The further thought that, premising the loveliness of young women as nature’s infallible way of insuring them husbands, these two could at best marry no more than a few of the men in the world, was less than no consolation at all.”

“What a silly routine, Natalie thought, not realizing, sitting there alone on the stool in the center of the ring of girls, how she was jeopardizing her own future in college, her own future for four years and perhaps for the rest of her life; how even worse than the actual being a bad sport was the state of mind which led her into defiance of this norm, this ring of placid, masked girls, with their calm futures ahead and their regular pasts proven beyond a doubt; how one person, stepping however aside from their meaningless, echoing standards, set perhaps by a violent movement before their recollection, and handed down to them by other placid creatures, might lose a seat among them by questions, by rebellion, by anything except a cheerful smile and the resolution to hurt other people.”

“‘A mother gets very lonesome without her daughter,’ Miss Waite said. ‘Especially when it’s an only daughter. A mother gets lonesomer than anything in the world.’

“At that time, of course, Natalie reflected with contentment, her life would be done. There would be no further fears for Natalie, no possibility of walking wrong when you were no more than a skull in a strange man’s hands.”

“In his history of German film art, a Nazi-minded product with some remnants of pre-Nazi evaluations, Oskar Kalbus connects the vogue of historical pageants with the moment of their production; they were produced, he contends, ‘because in times of national emergency people are particularly susceptible to representations of great historic periods and personalities.’ He completely overlooks the fact that this susceptibility was betrayed by films representing not so much historical periods as personal appetites and seeming to seize upon history for the sole purpose of removing it thoroughly from the field of vision. It is not as if the historical films of Italian or American origin had ever achieved miracles of perspicacity; but the sustained lack of comprehension in the Lubitsch films is significant inasmuch as they emerged at a moment when it would have been in the interest of the new democratic regime to enlighten the people about social and political developments. All these German pageants which the Americans mistook for summits of ‘historical realism’ instinctively sabotaged any understanding of historic processes, any attempt to explore patterns of conduct in the past.”