Save Me the Waltz

1
“Those girls,” people said, “think they can do anything and get away with it.”

“It is good to amuse oneself when one can afford it,”

My sitting room in Petrograd was yellow and always full of flowers. I said then to myself, ‘I am too happy. This cannot last.’ ”

pride keeps me from feeling half the things I ought to feel.”

“And I warn you that I am a monogamist at heart if not in theory,”

I am a book. Pure fiction.”

“Then the direction of education should be to teach us to dramatize ourselves, to realize to the fullest extent the human equipment?”

Those girls,” people said, “think they can do anything and get away with it.”
That was because of the sense of security they felt in their father. He was a living fortress. Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes. Judge Beggs entrenched himself in his integrity when he was still a young man; his towers and chapels were builded of intellectual conceptions. So far as any of his intimates knew he left no sloping path near his castle open either to the friendly goatherd or the menacing baron. That inapproachability was the flaw in his brilliance which kept him from having become, perhaps, a figure in national politics. The fact that the state looked indulgently upon his superiority absolved his children from the early social efforts necessary in life to construct strongholds for themselves. One lord of the living cycle of generations to lift their experiences above calamity and disease is enough for a survival of his progeny.

Even as a baby, Alabama was particular like that about her own things—never wanted to share them, even then.”

She had a strong sense of her own insignificance; of her life’s slipping by while June bugs covered the moist fruit in the fig trees with the motionless activity of clustering flies upon an open sore.