Quartet - Jean Rhys

Stephan disliked being questioned and, when closely pressed, he lied.  He just lied.  Not plausibly or craftily, but impatiently and absent-mindedly.  So Marya had long ago stopped questioning.  For she was reckless, lazy, a vagabond by nature, and for the first time in her life she was very near to being happy.

He never explained his doings.  He was a secretive person, she considered.  Sometimes, without warning or explanation, he would go away for two or three days, and, left alone in the hotel, she dreaded, not desertion, but some vague, dimly-apprehended catastrophe.  But nothing happened.  It was a fantastic life, but it kept on its legs so to speak.  There was no catastrophe.  And eventually Marya stopped questioning and was happy.

*
From the balcony Marya could see one side of the Place Blanche.  Opposite, the Rue Lepic mounted upwards to the rustic heights of Montmartre.  It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach.

The lights winking up at a pallid moon, the slender painted ladies, the wings of the Moulin Rouge, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking.

The Place Blanche, Paris.  Life itself.  One realized all sorts of things.  The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.  All sorts of things.