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Then all at once I saw that I had been attacking a living creature, a creature with feelings and not an abstraction. She must once have been a little girl, on the secretive side, then a teenager, then a woman. She was forty years old, she was on her own, she loved a man and she had hoped to be happy with him for ten, maybe twenty years.

Cecile is such a contradictory character. Both guilty about what she did and adamant that it seas the right thing for her and her father. I guess it is the thought of Anne that disturbs her

I wished I could have been caressed, consoled and reconciled with myself. My father and Anne were silent. They had before them a night of love. I had Bergson. I tried to weep, to feel sorry for myself, but in vain. I was already feeling sorry for Anne, as if I were certain of vanquishing her.

Coming home every day to the same place at half past twelve to have lunch, eating at home in the evening and staying in afterwards: did my father really believe that was possible? However, he was cheerfully burying his bohemianism; he was commending the virtues of order and of a bourgeois lifestyle, elegant and well-organized. But doubtless, for him as well as for me, all this merely amounted to castles in the air.

I enjoy the narrative device of looking back on a Summer. See also A Month In The Country, and The Go-Between

This is a group read over at the Reading The Twentieth Century group in July 2025. I've started ahead of time as it's a library book and I am attracted to its brevity and wanted something light and easy following a couple of long books.