The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.
There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.
I’m improvident: I live in the moment when I’m happy.
She’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph.
I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.
My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.” “Freedom? Freedom from worries?” “From everything – from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit – that’s what I call success.
The “Hazeldean heart” was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.
In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women’s faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.
The stage was thought to have a shaping influence, for the most part a bad one, on youthful character and conduct in much the way television is thought to have in our day.
The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe.
The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.
They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.
It seems so to me,” said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.
She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.
But then you come; and you’re so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true.
And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?
Ruth Varnum was always as nervous as a rat; and, come to think of.
You don’t know how much I need such a friend,” she said. “My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women – my best friends – well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long – people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.
And how can anyone give you happiness who hasn’t got it himself?