A few great critics wrote wonderfully about her, but a vast majority of
them, trained only in witty disparagement and acute disintegrating
perception, became empty and formal in face of an unaccustomed challenge
to admiration and reverence.

It is only the generous who give to the rich, the big who praise the
big; the niggardly salve their consciences in doles to the humbly poor,
making life into a pilgrimage of greedy patrons in search of grateful
victims.

June was radiantly removed from the possible inroads of charity. You
couldn't even pretend to have discovered her--unless, of course, you
had met her--then you were quite sure that you had. Her friends
explained--as friends always do--that it was what she was, not what she
did, that mattered, that her letters and her conversation were far more
wonderful than her books, that she was her own greatest masterpiece.

It was irritating to be forced out of it like that, but when you had
seen her you began doing the same thing.

It was impossible not to want to tell people that her hair was like a
crisp heap of rusty October beech leaves, that she always had time for
you. And then you began to explain that she was happily married, which
led you to the fact that she was happy, which reminded you that you were
happy, by which time no one was listening to you. But it didn't seem to
matter. People would ask such silly questions about her. "Does she
admire Dostoievski?" they would say, and you would answer, "She has the
most enchanting brown squirrel----"

George wasn't thinking any of those things. His mind didn't work like