A background of quiet

Henrietta, in A City of Bells, is a character after my own heart. The line describing feeling that 'everything that was worth while in her mind fell out' is a feeling I know well when I am too rushed here and there. I am now unashamedly non-ambitious, in the secular understanding of it. If I get to three weeknight evenings out in a row, I then say 'I want no more of this and I simply must go home'. So here is a quote for an introvert's Sunday.

Henrietta, at heart a contemplative person, enjoyed alarums and excursions for a short while only. For her a background of quiet was essential to happiness. It had been fun to stay with Felicity, to be petted and spoiled by her friends, to be applauded by big audiences in a crowded theatre, to have lovely things to eat and go to the zoo whenever she liked, but it had completely upset her equilibrium and she had felt as though she had been turned upside down so that everything that was worth while in her mind fell out. She, like everyone else, had to find out by experience in what mode of life she could best adjust herself to the twin facts of her own personality and the moment of time in which destiny had planted it, and she was lucky perhaps that she found out so early.

~Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells