The ​Sundial 2 csillagozás

After the funeral they came back to the house, now indisputably Mrs. Halloran's. They stood uneasily, without any certanity, in the large lovely entrance hall, and watched Mrs. Halloran go into the right wing of the house to let Mr. Halloran know that Lionel's last rites had gone off without melodrama. Young Mrs. Halloran, looking after her mother-in-law, said without hope, „Maybe she will drop dead on the doorstep. Fancy, dear, would you like to see Granny drop dead on the doorstep?”
„Yes, mother.” Fancy pulled at the long skirt of the black dress her grandmother had put on her.

első bekezdés

She forced herself to sit up primly on the edge of the marble bench, repressing firmly the nausea she felt at its warm pressure, and she smoothed the black linen of her dress across her lap, and tucked in her hair, which had somehow come loose, and crossed her aknles decently, and she took her black-edged handkerchief from her bosom and dried her eyes and wiped away the dampness and grime from her face. Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.

When shall we live if not now?

Toward the end of August the weather turned strange; various and unusual phenomena were reported from one end of the country to the other: freak snow storms, hurricanes, hail from a clear sky. Around the big house there were thunderstorms every afternoon, coming with heavy regularity, the clouds beginning to mass blackly on the horizon shortly after four o’clock, and moving with speed until in an hour the sky was black, and, by six, clear again. If the first Mr. Halloran had been alive he might have pointed out that although everyone talked about the weather, no one did anything about it; there were cases of death from heat and death from drowning and death from wind in each morning’s newspaper, along with statements that the earth’s surface was being lowered into the oceans at the rate of two inches a century; a volcano which had been dormant for five hundred years erupted, blasted its surrounding countryside, and fell asleep again forever.
A woman in Chicago was arrested for leading a polar bear clipped like a French poodle into a large downtown department store. A man in Texas won a divorce from his wife because she tore out the last chapter of every mystery story he borrowed from the library. A television set in Florida refused to let itself be turned off; until its owners took an axe to it, it continued, on or off, presenting inferior music and stale movies and endless, maddening advertising, and even under the axe, with its last sigh, it died with the praises of a hair tonic on its lips.