But when I felt her guiding me to the chair, the maddest desire to seize her came over me - to seize her in my arms to tear off those glasses, to kiss those beautiful blue eyes they hid - to hold her fragile scrap of a body tight against my breast, to tell her that I loved her - and wanted to hold her there, mine and no one else’s in all the world My God! what am I writing - I must crush this nonsense - I must be sane.

One day he drops his stick and she offers to help him to his chair:Īnd I let her - I wanted to feel her touch - I have never even shaken hands with her before. Gradually, though, he becomes obsessed by this women, the opposite of the French demi-mondaines. Her clothes are neat but shabby I suppose she is very poor. Her hands look as if she had done rather a lot of hard work-they are so very thin.

I do not like her much She is a small creature, palish with rather good bright brown hair-She wears horn rimmed spectacles with yellow glasses in them so I can’t see her eyes at all.

He decides to do so – it is about antiqueĮnglish furniture – but decides he needs a secretary to take hisĭictation, and is recommended a young Englishwoman, Miss Sharp: Mistress, Suzette, whom he pays generously for her attentions, but he Germans may be attacking Paris - Friends and relations may be dying in heaps, but women must have new clothes and fashion must have her say as to their shapes - And what a mercy it is so! If there was nothing to relieve war and seriousness - all the nations would be raving lunatics by now. His acquaintances allīelong to the leisure class especially, there is a group of womenįriends who see no reason why war should interfere with their life of I look at my mutilated face before I replace the black patch over the left eye, and I realize that, with my crooked shoulder, and the leg gone from the right knee downwards, that no woman can feel emotion for me again in this world.įrom the Army, he is in Paris during 1918. I am sick of my life-The war has robbed it of all that a young man can find of joy. It takes the form of the journal of Sir Nicholas Thormonde, who has been wounded in the Great War: Book Review by George S: This is a thoroughly unpleasant book.

Man and Maid by Elinor Glyn