Real Women

Now that he was telling it all to Natasha he experienced that pleasure which a man has when women listen to him-not clever women who when listening either try to remember what they hear to enrich their minds and when opportunity offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their own and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their own little mental workshop-but the pleasure given by real women gifted with a capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself.

War & Peace
Leo Tolstoy

The Storm

The wind caught the Villa full in the face, one stinging challenge like the slash of a gauntlet. Elegant, rococo, with an air of balance delicately perilous, it yet struck down deep into the rock, deep as a fortress. It braced itself, and now the assailing forces of the wind came singing between the pillars of the parapet. Row on row, the windows looked unflinchingly out into the sky, though here and there the swinging-to of a shutter was like the nervous and involuntary flicker of an eyelid. The attack begun, the clouds brought up their artillery; lightning, splitting the sky, shimmered across the flagstones of the terrace. The honey-coulored facade, soaked and languorous with sunshine, stood up, naked, sensitive as flesh, to the stinging onslaught of the rain that beat against the windows with a faint, fine, infinitesimal clatter.

The Storm
Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen