It’s the worst. The dismally singular way it feels to read Evelyn Waugh. In the spaces between the narrative he will take these pauses, aching and hypnotic and elegant, and in each one it feels like my body is drawing in this brume of incredulous, weeping gratitude for everything beautiful in the world, and it is as close to church as I can come. How in the hell anyone so repulsively British could write anything so perfectly arresting, I can tell you I find it perfectly irritating.
And, as he lay, he looked across the hall to the row of women; scarcely observing them, his eyes passed from one rapt face to another, until in the lowest place but highest by a handbreadth, Helena raised hers to meet them. They gazed at one another, unknowing, seperate, then running together like drops of condensed steam on the ewer, pausing, bulging one against the other, until, suddenly, they were one and ran down in a single minute cascade. Helena trotted on and Constantius bestrode her in triumph.
Constantius had done something unprecedented and unpremeditated, something for which his talents were ill suited; he had fallen in love.
- from Evelyn Waugh’s
