very quiet and still, as though it were thinking its own thoughts, or dreaming perhaps. - P. L. Travers

On one occasion, an ancient great-aunt of mine, hieratically assuming a head-dress of feather and globules of jet, required me to accompany her to the beehives. ‘But you surely don't need a hat, Aunt Jane! They're only at the end of the garden.’ ‘It is the custom,’ she said, grandly. ‘Put a scarf over your head.’ Arrived, she stood in silence for a moment. Then — ‘I have to tell you,’ she said, formally, ‘that King George V is dead. You may be sorry, but I am not. He was not an interesting man. Besides,’ she added — as though the bees needed the telling! — ‘everyone has to die’.

When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.

Do you think that everything in the world is inside something else? My little Park inside the big one and the big one inside a larger one? Again and again? Away and away?” She waved her arm to take in the sky. “And to someone very far out there — do you think we would look like ants?” “Ants