putterings 329 < 330 > 331 index
agaye. agaye. get away, to agaye.
“You don’t really like farming: you only think you ought to. What do you really like?”
“Going away. Getting out of this confounded country into the South of France. I’m not really happy, Mary, till I’m pottering about my garden at Agaye.”
She looked where he was looking. Two drawings above the chimney-piece. A chain of red hills swung out into a blue sea. The Estérel. A pink and white house on the terrace of a hill. House and hill blazing out sunshine.
Agaye. Agaye. Pottering about his garden at Agaye. He was happy there.
“Well, you can get away. To Agaye.”
“Not as much as I should like. My wife can’t stand more than six weeks of it.”
“So that you aren’t really happy at Agaye. . . . I thought I was the only person who felt like that. Miserable because I’ve been doing my own things instead of sewing, or reading to Mamma.”
“That’s the way conscience makes cowards of us all.”
“If it was even my consciousness. But it’s Mamma’s. And her conscience was Grandmamma’s. And Grandmamma’s —”
“And mine?”
“Isn’t yours a sort of landlord’s conscience? Your father’s?”
“No. No. It’s mine all right. My youth had a conscience.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t put off with somebody else’s?”
“Perhaps. At Oxford we were all social reformers. The collective conscience of the group, perhaps. I wasn’t strong enough to rise to it. Wasn’t strong enough to resist it. . . . [258] Don’t do that, my child. Find out what you want, and when you see your chance, take it. Don’t funk it.
— May Sinclair, Mary Olivier : A Life (1919) : 257
NYPL copy (via google) : link
Harvard copy (among others, via hathitrust) : link
Ursula Young provides a good overview on May Sinclair (and Mary Olivier) at her Neglected Authors blog : link
May Sinclair (1863-1946)
wikipedia : link