"He makes me feel like a mother to him!" said Hildreth.
Though each of these remarks was made without the slightest colour of irony, I did not like them ... I lowered my head, humiliated under them.
Ever since I had been among them the three women had treated me in the way they act with small boys, preserving scarcely any reserve in my presence. Penton himself had lost all his first disquiet.
Outside—
"I'll take you as far as the cottage ... it's right on the way, you know."
"All right, but where are you going?"
"Into the kitchen to get a lantern."
"The moon is almost as bright as day. We won't need it."
We stepped out into the warm, scented night. In a mad flood of silver the moon reigned high in the sky, dark and bright with the contours and shades of its continents and craters, as if nearer the earth than it had ever been before....
"This night reminds me of those lines in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the ones that follow after 'Is this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilion?' which are, to me, a trifle over-rhetorical ... the ensuing lines are more lovely: