... having been breathed out

Cambridge has begun again, and is a good deal more putrid than ever. […] Keynes sits like a decayed and amorous spider in King’s, weaving purely imaginary webs, noticing everything that happens and doesn’t happen, and writing to me by every other post. There’s a poor young freshman called Norton, who is very innocent indeed, so innocent that he has been an atheist from birth, and a sodomite from puberty. Keynes perpetually talks to him, but is now getting a little nervous, because he’s beginning to think that Norton thinks that Keynes is in love with him. And he doesn’t know whether he is. Eh bien! I suppose I shall find myself trundling down there in a Saturday or two to take the cover off the pullulating pot and have a sniff.

—Lytton Strachey to Clive Bell, 17 January 1906

I love the lack of specificity in “And he doesn’t know whether he is.” I can only assume it’s intentional. I also love how all the Bloomsburies pretended to despise Cambridge and yet never, for the whole of their lives, ceased their obsessive writing about it.