The Charioteer

One might almost as well, thought Laurie, have said it aloud. Because he did for me what you wouldn’t do, I’m alive to be with you now. Here at last, stripped of the secondary things, of motive and praise and blame, were the bare bones of logic, grinning in the sun.

Only a few minutes before I met him, I’d found out that he saved my life.”

“How?” said Andrew. Laurie saw it then, when it was too late to do anything but go on.

“Well, perhaps that’s rather a stagy way of putting it. He commanded the ship that brought me back from Dunkirk, that’s all.”

“How lucky you found out in time.” There was a helpless and painful silence.

One might almost as well, thought Laurie, have said it aloud. Because he did for me what you wouldn’t do, I’m alive to be with you now. Here at last, stripped of the secondary things, of motive and praise and blame, were the bare bones of logic, grinning in the sun.

Ralph’s tragedy is that he’s retained through everything a curious innocence about it. I suppose when at last he loses that, the tragedy will be complete.”

“It’s not what one is, it’s what one does with it.”

“Get your feet on the ground, my dear. People get sick of what they are. They get sick of carrying it.

The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.

Lines of decision showed around his eyes and mouth; at nineteen, he was marked already with the bleak courage of the self-disciplined neurotic.