Spark: The Thoroughly Modern Fleur Talbot

That shocked look of hers reminded me very strongly of the look on the face of my lover's wife, Dottie, on another occasion. I must say that Dottie was a better educated woman than Beryl Tims, but the look was the same. She had confronted me with my affair with her husband, which I thought was tiresome of her. I replied, 'Yes Dottie, I love him. I love him off and on, when he doesn't interfere with my poetry and so forth. In fact I've started a novel which requires a lot of poetic concentration because, you see, I conceive everything poetically. So perhaps it will be more off than on with Leslie.'

Dottie was relieved that she wasn't in danger of losing her man, at the same time as she was horrified by what she called my unnatural attitude, which in fact was quite natural to me.

'Your head rules your heart,' she said in her horror.
I told her this was a stupid way of putting things. She knew this was true, but in moments of crisis she fell back on banalities. She was a moralist and accused me then of spiritual pride. 'Pride goes before a fall,' said Dottie. In fact if I had pride it was vocational in nature; I couldn't help it, and I've never found it necessarily precedes falls. [28]

I too was a Catholic believer, but not of that sort, not of that sort at all. And if it was true, as Dottie always said, that I was taking terrible risks with my immortal soul, I would have been incapable of caution on those grounds. I had an art to practise and a life to live, and faith abounding; and I simply didn't have the time or the mentality for guilds and indulgences, fasts and feasts and observances. I've never held it right to create more difficulties in matters of religion than already exist. [130-131]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.

read for the Slaves of Golconda reading group