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Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941

"The Voyage Out"

I'm not a bit ashamed of it. They
loved each other anyhow, and that's more than most people can say of
their parents."
Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her hands, and
compared them--the man and the woman who had, so Evelyn said, loved
each other. That fact interested her more than the campaign on behalf of
unfortunate women which Evelyn was once more beginning to describe. She
looked again from one to the other.
"What d'you think it's like," she asked, as Evelyn paused for a minute,
"being in love?"
"Have you never been in love?" Evelyn asked. "Oh no--one's only got to
look at you to see that," she added. She considered. "I really was in
love once," she said. She fell into reflection, her eyes losing
their bright vitality and approaching something like an expression of
tenderness. "It was heavenly!--while it lasted. The worst of it is it
don't last, not with me. That's the bother."
She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sinclair about
which she had pretended to ask Rachel's advice. But she did not want
advice; she wanted intimacy. When she looked at Rachel, who was still
looking at the photographs on the bed, she could not help seeing that
Rachel was not thinking about her. What was she thinking about, then?
Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was always
trying to work through to other people, and was always being rebuffed.


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