Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley

trees, in the Doria Gardens, like stars gone crazy.
    â€˜Who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto his glorious body . . .’
    â€˜Vile,
vile
?’ His very soul protested.
    Earth fell, one spadeful, then another. The box was almost covered. It was so small, so dreadfully and unexpectedly tiny . . . the image of that enormous ox, that minute tea-cup, rose to Anthony’s imagination. Rose up obscenely and would not be exorcized. The jackdaws cried again in the tower. Like a sea-gull she had swooped towards him, beautiful. But the oxwas still there, still in its tea-cup, still base and detestable; and he himself yet baser, yet more hateful.
    John Beavis released the hand he had been holding and, laying his arm round the boy’s shoulders, pressed the thin little body against his own – close, close, till he felt in his own flesh the sobs by which it was shaken.
    â€˜Poor child! Poor motherless child!’

C HAPTER V
December 8th 1926
    â€˜YOU WOULDN’T DARE,’ Joyce said.
    â€˜I would.’
    â€˜No, you wouldn’t.’
    â€˜I tell you I would,’ Helen Amberley insisted more emphatically.
    Maddeningly sensible. ‘You’d be sent to prison if you were caught,’ the elder sister went on. ‘No, not to prison,’ she corrected herself. ‘You’re too young. You’d be sent to a reformatory.’
    The blood rushed up to Helen’s face. ‘You and your reformatories!’ she said in a tone that was meant to be contemptuous, but that trembled with irrepressible anger. That reformatory was a personal affront. Prison was terrible; so terrible that there was something fine about it. (She had visited Chillon, had crossed the Bridge of Sighs.) But a reformatory – no! that was utterly ignoble. A reformatory was on the same level as a public lavatory or a station on the District Railway. ‘Reformatories!’ she repeated. It was typical of Joyce to think of reformatories. She always dragged anything amusing and adventurous down into the mud. And what made it so muchworse, she was generally quite right in doing so: the mud was facts, the mud was common sense. ‘You think I wouldn’t dare to do it, because
you
wouldn’t dare,’ Helen went on. ‘Well, I
shall
do it. Just to show you. I shall steal something from every shop we go to. Every one. So there.’
    Joyce began to feel seriously alarmed. She glanced questioningly at her sister. A profile, pale now and rigid, the chin defiantly lifted, was all that Helen would let her see. ‘Now, look here,’ she began severely.
    â€˜I’m not listening,’ said Helen, speaking straight ahead into impersonal space.
    â€˜Don’t be a little fool!’
    There was no answer. The profile might have been that of a young queen on a coin. They turned into the Gloucester Road and walked towards the shops.
    But suppose the wretched girl really meant what she said? Joyce changed her strategy. ‘Of course I know you dare,’ she said conciliatorily. There was no answer. ‘I’m not doubting it for a moment.’ She turned again towards Helen; but the profile continued to stare ahead with eyes unwaveringly averted. The grocer’s was at the next corner, not twenty yards away. There was no time to lose. Joyce swallowed what remained of her pride. ‘Now, look here, Helen,’ she said, and her tone was appealing, she was throwing herself on her sister’s generosity. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t.’ In her fancy she saw the whole deplorable scene. Helen caught red-handed; the indignant shopkeeper, talking louder and louder; her own attempts at explanation and excuse made unavailing by the other’s intolerable behaviour. For, of course, Helen would just stand there, in silence, not uttering a word of self-justification or regret, calm and contemptuously smiling, as though she were a superior being and everybody