11
" This fusion of wood and water is an entrancing thing. Without the wood the stream would be nothing: a mere thin watercourse winding through its flat meadows. Without the water the wood, on its slope and with its air of quietness and mystery and of being a world within itself, could not help being a constantly delightful thing. But water and wood, together, shading and watering and bounding each other, each give to the other something which the other does not possess, the wood giving to the stream something solid and shadowy and immemorial, the stream giving to the wood all the incomparable movement and twinkling transience of moving water, the tree shadows standing deep in the stream, the reflection of sunlight flickering a kind of waterlight up into the shadowy branches of pine and alder. The wood and the water are here, in fact, one, for each other and with each other. It is a fusion that is almost perfect. "
― H.E. Bates , Through the Woods
15
" But I drew the line, one evening, at Jerry O'Keefe's, the fish-shop where people crammed in late for hot plates of peas and chips and yellow-battered fish, in a kind of boiler house of steaming fat, after the last cinema show or the old theatre.
'But why?' she said. 'Why? It looks fun in there.'
I said I did not think it the place for her, and she said:
'You talk like a parson or something. You talk just like old Miss Crouch.'
'I'm not taking you,' I said.
'Why? If it's good enough for these people it's good enough for us, isn't it?'
'No.'
'That's because you're really an awful snob,' she said. 'You're too uppish to be seen in there.'
'It's not myself,' I said. 'It's you.'
'Are you going to take me or aren't you?' she said.
'No,' I said. 'I'm not.'
She turned and walked down the street. I stood for a moment alone, stubbornly, watching her swinging away into darkness out of the steamy, glowing gas-light. Then I had a moment of sickness when I felt she was walking out of my life, that I had given her impossible offence and that I should never see her again.
'Wait,' I said, 'wait. Don't go like that. I'll take you. "
― H.E. Bates , Love for Lydia