INDEX OF QUOTES
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The gates were painted black and orange, which I thought encouraging. I hardly knew what I expected. There were a great many ‘noises off’, yells and whoops and shrieks and laughter, but nothing in view except a disconsolate-looking hen walking across the untidy lawns. The front door, also painted black and orange, was open and I saw into a whitewashed hall with wildly futuristic paintings on the walls, and cocoanut matting on the stained boards of the floor. Finally a black-haired, stockingless, sandalled young woman came round a corner.... She showed me into a big room with more whitewashed walls and futuristic paintings, all discs and angles and cubes and distorted perspectives, in the German vein... .There was a grand piano in the room, and on it wild flowers in glass jam-jars. There were also rickety looking bookshelves overflowing with books of all descriptions, English and German, novels, poets, works on psychology and psycho-analysis. There were basket chairs with orange cushions, and on the bare boards of the floor Persian rugs. .. .Through the windows a great cedar tree reached its arms out over a tennis lawn, and beyond it the sea, the colour of light merged in a shimmering opalescence with the sky. Whilst I looked about and waited, and wondered, two boys and a girl, all hatless and in riding breeches, rode up on ponies and dismounted at the crumbling steps leading up to the front door. Presently other people drifted in, members of the staff; there were no introductions and nobody seemed surprised to find a stranger in their midst; being these one was accepted without question … It was all very casual – a simple, comfortable, friendly sort of casualness, infinitely refreshing. |
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