The Blue Castle

I've been keeping up appearances all my life. Now I'm going in for realities. Appearances can go hang!

No wonder his wife had died young. Valancy remembered her. A pretty, sensitive thing. Uncle James had denied her everything she wanted and showered on her everything she didn't want. He had killed her—quite legally. She had been smothered and starved.

Barney Snaith looked even more disreputable than usual just now. It was very evident that he hadn't shaved for days, and his hands and arms, bare to the shoulders, were black with grease. But he was whistling gleefully to himself and he seemed so happy that Valancy envied him. She envied him his light-heartedness and his irresponsibility and his mysterious little cabin up on an island in Lake Mistawis—even his rackety old Grey Slosson. Neither he nor his car had to be respectable and live up to traditions.

"I'm afraid heaven will be very dull after this past year," thought Valancy. "But perhaps one will not remember. Would that be—nice? No, no. I don't want to forget Barney. I'd rather be miserable in heaven remembering him than happy forgetting him. And I'll always remember through all eternity—that he really, really liked me."

"You forget, Moonlight, that there are different kinds of beauty. Your imagination is obsessed by the very obvious type of your cousin Olive. Oh, I've seen her—she's a stunner—but you'd never catch Allan Tierney wanting to paint her. In the horrible but expressive slang phrase, she keeps all her goods in the shop-window. But in your subconscious mind you have a conviction that nobody can be beautiful who doesn't look like Olive. Also, you remember your face as it was in the days when your soul was not allowed to shine through it.

Oh, I know. Yes, I'm 'still young'—but that's so different from young

"Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up?" queried Valancy. "Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain."

She was no longer solitary. She was one of a vast sisterhood—all the women who had ever loved in the world.

"I've stayed on earth in my dreams."

Some things come by lightning flashes. Valancy had had a lightning flash.