Miss Thriplow put away the thoughts as soon as they occurred to her: put them aside indignantly. They were monstrous thoughts, lying thoughts.
She picked up her pen again and wrote, very quickly, as though she were writing an exorcising spell and the sooner it had been put on paper the sooner the evil thoughts would vanish.
“Do you remember, Jim, that time we went out in the canoe together and nearly got drowned?…”
Part II: FRAGMENTS FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FRANCIS CHELIFER
Part II: Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer
CHAPTER I
Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along the warm Tyrrhenian. Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated face upwards on that blue and tepid sea. The sun beat down on me, turning the drops on my face and chest to salt. My head was pillowed in the unruffled water; my limbs and body dimpled the surface of a pellucid mattress thirty feet thick and cherishingly resilient through all its thickness, down to the sandy bed on which it was spread. One might lie paralysed here for a lifetime and never get a bedsore.