People come together in a room.

"So delighted," says somebody, "to meet you," and that is a lie.
And then: "I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now.

One does, I think, as one gets older." For women are always, always, always talking about what one feels, and if they say "as one gets older," they mean you to reply with something quite off the point.
Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for the theatre.

It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday.

The wild red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from clump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun, striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes.
Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.
Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him uneasy--when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral.