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“Miss Elton, who found the conversation increasingly distressing, got up, murmured a quick good night . . . and went to her room.

During the bellicose talk in the lounge, the ghosts of Frank Durrant, Madeleine, Arvid and Mr. Sorenius seemed to be slipping further and further away with their own receding world. And what was one offered in exchange for this world of the dead? A future in which all signposts pointed to war and the ruin of all those useless little things which made life worth living.

And then, as if provoked by the contrast of the speeches and ideas to which she had just been listening, a flood of images, each of them a small part of her life at Ashleigh Place, swept through her mind with an overwhelming suddenness—a walk on a windy autumn afternoon to the farm with a message about eggs, cartloads of logs coming before Christmas to be stacked in the stables, the remodelling of the rose-garden, with Mrs. Durrant setting the new labels in their places, two swans which spent a season on the little River Mene at the foot of the western slope, and the sudden appearance of a kingfisher by those fitful waters, the endless cooing of wood-pigeons in the trees round the house, the catch whistled by the baker's boy as he jumped out of his bright little van, the tick of the huge grandfather clock in the darkest corner of the hall, the pattern of the old-fashioned tiles in the bathroom which she had used, cockchafers beating against the windows on hot summer nights, the scent of the tobacco plants in the round bed near the drawing-room, an expedition to the woods on a grey day to cut mistletoe. . . .”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale

“I can't do with all that being taken from me. I can't do with a new world. There's no such thing as a new world. Each person has his own, which opens out like a flower, full of fragrance and beauty, and—then perhaps runs to seed and dies, as each person dies. But must it die? May it not be real always? If truth lies in ideas, and even more in feelings...”
― C.H.B. Kitchin, The Auction Sale