Chicago, Illinois. December 12, 2008. Talking to a very clever young person, you do not stick at hard words; on the other hand, you do not seek mystery. In the course of that meeting that never happened, that meeting whose scene remained inside Leopold, she would have told what she had done without looking for motives. These he could supply, for he would understand. You suppose the spools of negatives that are memory (from moments when the whole being was, unknowing, exposed), developed without being cut for a false reason: entire letters, dialogues which, once spoken, remain spoken for ever being unwound from the dark, word by word.

That is, in effect, what she would have to say.

Excerpted from ‘The House in Paris’ by Elizabeth Bowen. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1936.