Word: portia
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...enraged when her new house, like many another product of Britain's depression building boom, began to leak, creak and crumble. Last year she stopped making mortgage payments to the building society, and when the society sued, personally fought Britain's legal heavyweights to a standstill. "Portia" Borders became the heroine of thousands of Britons who pay high rents for grimy kennels or find their shiny new houses falling apart. Many of them have been making it tough for landlords as increasing numbers of "Tenants' Defence Leagues" have demanded lower rents, better plumbing, repairs. If the owner...
...Death of the Heart describes such a meeting. Heroine is Portia Quayne, a product of a lonely, itinerant girlhood with her mother in second-rate European hotels. Orphaned at 16, she goes to live with her halfbrother, a successful London ad man. His wife, a sophisticated dilettante, grudgingly tolerates Portia at the beginning, detests her after she finds and reads Portia's diary, whose wide-eyed observations on her guardians read like satire...
Thereafter, uncertain whether Portia is "a snake or a rabbit," the wife treats her like someone who knows where the body is buried. Simple-hearted Portia (she had "those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere") merely tries to figure out what makes these enigmatic grownups tick...
...other innocent is Eddie, one of the wife's bright young men. Several years older than Portia, malicious, cynical, charming, he is that far more complex character, the corrupt innocent, who "had gone wrong through dealing with other people in terms that he found later were not their own." To him, Portia's innocence is a last oasis in the world's wasteland. But he plays her false with another girl, compromises her with everybody, ironically completes his betrayal when he refuses her love, saying she has the same ulterior motives as everybody else...
...Portia's betrayal is climaxed when she discovers that her diary has been discovered and talked about. She runs away, first to Eddie, who turns her down cold, then to a middle-aged innocent, who betrays her hysterical marriage proposal by telephoning her guardians to come...