Wednesday, January 22, 2020

the last book I ever read (J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, excerpt three)

from Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger:

Mrs. Silsburn said nothing, and I didn’t look at her to see just how seriously she’d been affronted by the Matron of Honor’s remark. I remember, though, that I was impressed, in a peculiar sense, with the Matron of Honor’s tone of apology for her little slip about “crazy aunts and uncles.” It had been a genuine apology, but not an embarrassed and, still better, not an obsequious one, and for a moment I had a feeling that, for all her stagy indignation and showy grit, there was something bayonetlike about her, something not altogether unadmirable. (I’ll grant, quickly and readily, that my opinion in this instance has a very limited value. I often feel a rather excessive pull toward people who don’t overapologize.) The point is, however, that right then, for the first time, a small wave of prejudice against the missing groom passed over me, a just perceptible little whitecap of censure for his unexplained absenteeism.



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