"A High Wind in Jamaica" [.]

[fiefoe]

<Emily and her earthquake>

• Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. ...  But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able to see anything, or realize that anyone else pretended to even a self-delusive fiction of existence.
• "But I don't want any more adventures!" sobbed Emily: "I've got an Earthquake!"
• Now she would be eleven in a few months: a great age: and in all that long life, how little of interest or significance had happened to her! There was her Earthquake, of course, and she had slept with an alligator: but what were these compared with the experiences of Miss Dawson, who knew London so well it hardly seemed any longer wonderful to her...
  

<Spoiler: the children were safe.>

• It was Laura who was cured the quickest. She suddenly discovered what a beautiful deep cave her arm-pit made, and decided to keep fairies in it in future. For some time she could think of nothing else.
• Life threatened to be no longer an incessant, automatic discharge of energy.
• (Reunion:) The little ones held back at first, but soon followed Emily's example, leaping on her and shouting: indeed it looked more like Actaeon with his hounds than a mother with her children
• (London) seemed a very far-fetched fulfillment of the prophecy.
  

<Last observations:>
__ After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion.
__ A criminal court is a very curious place. The seat of a ritual quite as elaborate as any religious one, it lacks in itself any impressiveness or symbolism of architecture. A robed judge in court looks like a catholic bishop would if he were to celebrate mass in some municipal bath-house.

Stockholm tar, dolphin striker

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