“If only he could be a little ironical, many fresh topics would be thrown open to him. But Hilda did not like irony; to her it was a form of shirking, and writing to her Eustace was often conscious of being a shirker. He was apt to slip from one sorry pose to another, which was unfair between two people who loved each other, and stranged, because he did not feel self-conscious when he was with her. But his pen created a literary prsonality with whom he felt she was out of sympathy.”
L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda