Status Updates From The Black Wings

“He recalled the two or three occasions when, as a boy of eighteen or nineteen, he had come to houses like this. The darkness had lent them the charm of mystery, but he had always come away baffled and disappointed, disgusted with himself and with the driving force that had been so extolled by the poets he read and believed in. One forgot and tried again, but it was always the same thing.”

“He walked slowly down the road. There are so many ways of losing a friend. This, he felt, was one of them. It was not likely that Penistone’s affection for him would survive Dolly’s amused contempt. A relic of the Victorian age, as jejune and useless as—as an antimacassar. He tried to remember what he had felt at twenty about middle-aged people, and failed. Had he even realised that they existed?”

“There was a tradition…that the erring maid of honour had been buried before the altar in the old church a year or two before it had to be abandoned to the encroaching sea, and that ever since the bell could be heard pealing under the water, a ghostly warning of wrath to come, whenever some great trouble threatened her descendants.”

“ It was the first anonymous letter he had ever received. The writer made an allusion to his family history which might be meant either as a warning or a threat and appealed for financial assistance. He gave an address but appended no signature. Roger was about to throw the letter into the fire, but on second thoughts he kept it…”ok, I’m intrigued!.

“ He breathed more freely when he was out on the high road again. He had done his duty by poor Caroline, and since she had expressed a wish that he should attend the Wendell sale he would run up to town tomorrow. He was not devoted to his wife as the nurses supposed; she had killed his love for her long ago; but he pitied her profoundly.”