Summer Part I

I'm enjoying Summer very much, I have actually finished it already just because I couldn't just stop reading...haha but I'll only post notes for the first 70 pages for now.
Wharton kind of hits you over the head with the names Royall and Charity in this one. She even says "she had been christened Charity to commemorate Mr. Royall's disinterestedness in 'bringing her down,' and to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence"...which totally makes Royall sound like a complete jerk right at the beginning, but then again, he did go up and bring her down and paid for her expenses her whole life.
Obviously there is a whoooole bunch of heat mentioned, along with light and gold and darkness and shadows to contrast that. You kind of just get the sense that the whole summer was a passion filled golden haze, which it was. In contrast, Mr. Royall and North Dormer are always her weight that drags her back down to reality when she is floating in the clouds, the "had been to her merely the person who is always there, the unquestioned central fact of life, as inevitable but as uninteresting as North Dormer itself, or any of the other conditions fate had laid in her."
There are some super awesome descriptions given at the festival type thing:
"In some, waves of silk and ribbon broke over shores of imitation moss from which ravishing hats rose like tropical orchids."
"everything was merged in her brain in swimming circles of hart and blinding alterations of light and darkness."
"Where the sun struck the water its shafts flamed back blindingly at the heat-veiled sky; and the least shade was black by contrast."
"A green veil of willows overhung them. Beyond the trees, wheat-fields sparkled in the sun; and all along the horizon the clear hills throbbed with light."
"but her elips had the same lovely curve, and the same cold mocking smile, as if there were some secret absurdity in the person she was looking at, and she had instantly detected it."
"A longer interval of darkness followed, and then the whole night broke into flower. From every point of the horizon, gold and silver arches sprang up their flaming petals and hung their branches with golden fruit; and all the while the air was filled with a soft supernatural hum as though great birds were building their nests in those invisible-tree-tops."
There's so many more but you get the point...
Tali Sinjem