Susan in NC’s Reviews > Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer > Status Update

“Mrs. Lorimer could not imagine how some women seemed to find it romantic and exciting…to meet an old flame again. She was finding this maddeningly tedious, and it seemed impossible to make Richard understand that, far from being an old flame, he was the deadest of dead ash to her. She remembered that the impact of Richard’s personality had always exhausted her…and now she felt battered.”

“She had reached that halfway stage in life when there seems to be a pause before starting down the far side of the hill to that unknown valley where death is waiting, and the dark river that has to be crossed.Youth with its fevers and unrest, its terrible miseries and lovely ecstasy, was behind her, gone for ever.She knew it was a loss, but an unavoidable one, and very sensibly seldom looked back over her shoulder.”

“Remembering, while she looked unhappily out at the sun-washed hillsides, the serious small boy with the scratched and grubby knees who had brought all his perplexities to her, Mrs. Lorimer, that quiet woman, so unsentimental that she had sometimes been condemned as cold and unfeeling, shed a few of the slow bitter tears of middle age.“

“The two were friends and had been for many years before Miss Douglas, a little battered by war experiences, had settled down in Threipford, to Mrs. Lorimer’s quiet content. Not only were they genuinely fond of one another, but they had many mutual interests; but neither had ever tried to probe into her friend’s innermost reserves, and this reticence seemed only to have strengthened the friendship.”