Literature Project #41 Dorothy L. Sayers 'Busman's Honeymoon'
41 days into my year long daily Literature project. I used to love building houses of cards, I think it was my Grandmother who first showed me how to do it, sometimes I had achieved a particularly impressive structure when the inevitable happened and the whole lot would come tumbling down! In my quotation today we have Lord Peter Wimsey in rather a grumpy mood:
"Harriet saw her off and returned to the sitting-room, where her lord and master was gloomily building a house of cards with a greasy old pack which he had unearthed from the what-not. ‘Well!’ said Harriet, in unnaturally cheerful tones, ‘they’ve gone. At last we are alone!’ ‘That’s a blessing,’ said he, glumly. ‘Yes; I couldn’t have stood much more. Could you?’ ‘Not any more. . . . And I can’t stand it now.’ The words were not said rudely; he sounded merely helpless and exhausted. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Harriet. He made no reply, seeming absorbed in adding the fourth storey to his structure. She watched him for a few moments, then decided he was best left alone and wandered upstairs to fetch pen and paper. She thought it might be a good thing to write a few lines to the Dowager Duchess...The card house had reached the sixth storey. At the sound of her step, Peter started, his hand shook, and the whole flimsy fabric dissolved into ruins. He muttered something and began doggedly to rebuild it...Peter was frowning; the house, risen once again to the fourth storey, was showing signs of imminent collapse. Without meaning to, she began to laugh. ‘What’s the joke?’ said Peter. The tottering cards immediately slid apart, and he damned them fretfully."
I am continuing to enjoy your literature project. Because we are Get Pushed partners this week and because you made a comment about wishing you were in Thailand, I wondered how you felt about adding Joseph Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’ to your project, and responding photographically to that novel?? Let me know if you prefer another challenge, cheers Suzanne
