Bliss, and Other Stories

blew over the garden, dropping dew and dropping petals, shivered over the drenched paddocks, and was lost in the som

nning over the brown stones, running in and out of the sandy hollows, hiding under cl

the little birds, the goldfinches and linnets and fan-tails flicked from bough to bough. A lovely kingfisher per

and caught the tiny bird and stroked its head with her finger. It was quite tame. But a funny thing happened. As she stroked it began to swell, it ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger and its round eyes seemed to smile knowingly at her. Now her arms were hardly wide enou

you, did I? Nothing much wrong

on one elbow to see the room by daylight. All the furniture had found a place-all the old paraphernalia-as she expressed it. Even the photographs were on the mantelpiece and the medicine bottles on the shelf above the wash-stand. Her clothes lay across a cha

unlight he began to do his exercises. Deep breathing, bending and squatting like a frog and shooting out his legs. He was so delighted with his firm, obedient body that he hit h

white shirt only to find that some idiot had fastened the neck-

a big fat tur

nley. "I haven't a square in

it's iron,"

f my age." He began parting his bushy ginger hair, his blue eyes fixed and round in the glass, his knees bent, because the dressing table was always-confound it-a bit too

You'll never be fat. Yo

ted for the hundredth time, and taking a pearl pen

r says you are not to get up yet." She popped her head in at t

ng. You should see poor dear mother wringing out the tables and the chairs.

ggy round in time? It's a good si

the office will be like," thought Linda

g. But Pat was evidently hard to find; the si

final slam of the front door told

ain, to her great surprise, round the next tree or the next corner. "Oh, there you are after all." They had been turned out after breakfast and told not to come back to the house un

onged to find some light and menial duty that Kezia

way," said

come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large substantial things like furniture, but curtains and the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt

mes, when she had fallen asleep in the daytime, she woke and could not lift a finger, could not even turn her eyes to left or right because THEY were there; sometimes when she went out of a room and left it empty, she knew as she clicked the door to that THEY were filling it. And there were times in the evenings when she was upstairs, perhaps, and everybody else was down, when she could hardly escape from them. Then

, and she heard the silence spinning its soft endless web. H

e floated, held up in the air. Only she seemed to be listening with her wide open watchful eyes, waitin