Aňa’s Reviews > The Secret History > Status Update

There was no trace of emotion upon his face, or of any effort to conceal it.

A terrible sweetness boiled up in me.

At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.

These sudden, panicky attempts at reconciliation annoyed me more than his insults.

I’d attributed this to my own mental perversity, some degenerate vagary of thought, a projection of my own desire (…)

It was always fun to tell Francis a story. He leaned forward and hung on every word, reacting at appropriate intervals with astonishment, sympathy, dismay.

Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass.

Her surprise seemed perfectly natural. The problem was that she was such an expert actress it was impossible to know if it was genuine.

(…) Julian did not allow many visitors. This was not so surprising as it sounds; he kept a gentle but firm distance between himself and his students; and though he was much more fond of us than teachers generally are of their pupils, it was not, even with Henry, a relationship of equals, and our classes with him ran more along the lines of benevolent dictatorship than democracy.

By that time, by some purely subconscious means, I had developed a successful mental block about the murder and everything pertaining to it. I talked about it in select company but seldom thought of it when alone.