The Portrait

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not–some people of course never do,–the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of
pleasure. …Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

Godot

Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
ESTRAGON: Am I?
VLADIMIR: I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
ESTRAGON: Me too.
VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.
VLADIMIR:
(hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON:
In a ditch.
VLADIMIR:
(admiringly). A ditch! Where?
ESTRAGON:
(without gesture). Over there.
VLADIMIR:
And they didn’t beat you?
ESTRAGON:
Beat me? Certainly they beat me.
VLADIMIR:
The same lot as usual?
ESTRAGON:
The same? I don’t know.
VLADIMIR:
When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.
ESTRAGON:
And what of it?
VLADIMIR:(gloomily). It’s too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.
ESTRAGON: Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.
VLADIMIR: Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it’s too late. They wouldn’t even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing?
ESTRAGON: Taking off my boot. Did that never happen to you?
VLADIMIR: Boots must be taken off every day, I’m tired telling you that. Why don’t you listen to me? ESTRAGON: (feebly). Help me!
VLADIMIR: It hurts?
ESTRAGON: (angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
VLADIMIR: (angrily). No one ever suffers but you. I don’t count. I’d like to hear what you’d say if you had what I have.
ESTRAGON: It hurts?
VLADIMIR: (angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
ESTRAGON: (pointing). You might button it all the same.
VLADIMIR:(stooping). True. (He buttons his fly.) Never neglect the little things of life.
ESTRAGON: What do you expect, you always wait till the last moment.
VLADIMIR: (musingly). The last moment . . . (He meditates.) Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?
ESTRAGON: Why don’t you help me?
VLADIMIR: Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . .(he searches for the word) . . .appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot.He peers inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well?
ESTRAGON: Nothing.