Book passages
For my own future reference. Character purposes.
Dancers in Mourning:
As Campion stood balancing his lean body, his heels on the curb and his shoulders braced against the high mantelshelf, he looked at the girl seated in his wing chair and made the disturbing discovery that the progress of an affair of the heart does not cease at the point where two parties are separated, resuming its course when they meet again, but rather continues its relentless progress slowly and inexorably over time, whether the participants are together or apart.
[snip]
She glanced up at him and he saw that her small face was white and stiff and her honey-coloured eyes dark with worry.
His heart contracted suddenly and painfully, and this, the final emotional straw, turned the wheel right over and he felt gloriously and freely angry with her. The whole monstrous imposition of love confronted him and he boiled at it.
"Well," he said spitefully, "this is very nice of you."
[snip]
She turned her face into the upholstery of the chair and he paused abruptly and stared at her, his eyes wretched. There was a long silence and in it he was acutely aware that he was in his own familiar room and that she was in it, too, and no right thing there.
He took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and dropped it lightly onto her hand.
The movement roused her and she took it up and looked at it.
"You're very hard," she said. "I didn't realise that. Incredibly hard."
"Solid rock," he agreed. "Granite. Beneath the superstratum of mud you come to stone. The ghastly monotony is relieved here and there by occasional fossilized fish."
