Sri Aurobindo
Collected Plays and Stories
CWSA. Volume 3 and 4
Incomplete and Fragmentary Stories
Mrs. Bolton was one of those sharp and rancid women whose very aspect gives a cultured man the toothache; it recalls vividly the taste of sour grapes. There had perhaps been a time when she was not elderly, but the boldest flight of metaphor would never have imaged her as young. The slanders of her enemies drew a frightful picture of the low-class Gorgon: they compared her chin to a penknife, her lips to a pair of icicles: her smile was a perpetual reminder of vinegar, her voice was like frost against the teeth. The sobriety of history merely records that her face was twin sister to a ferret, her features sharp and if the word may be used without offence gritty: altogether she was an excellent type of that class of crude failures whose mould nature has left unbroken that there may be a scourge for the refined and a pattern for housewifes.
Her face was Nemesis sculptured in marble
In her distress the child of the hothouse spoke the language of nature.
“I never forgive, but I bear no malice when I have requited”
She felt as if she were groping for a coin in the dark
A fire of remembrance burned a forgotten sentence into her brain and wrote it in crimson on her cheeks.
The voiceful hurry of the indicator copied the pattering footfall of the fugitive hours.
His amazement unwound itself in a coil of laughter.
Just as the clouds that steal the sunshine cannot throttle the sunlight as well
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