“I feel,” he said, after a silence, as though I were just beginning to have something to write about.

This time I thought I’d give them one I’d just written myself.

“Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.”

Lenina alone said nothing. Pale, her blue eyes clouded with an unwonted melancholy, she sat in a corner, cut off from those who surrounded her by an emotion which they did not share. She had come to the party filled with a strange feeling of anxious exultation. “In a few minutes,” she had said to herself, as she entered the room, “I shall be seeing him, talking to him, telling him” (for she had come with her mind made up) “that I like him—more than anybody I’ve ever known. And then perhaps he’ll say …”