But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.
Since then there has been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings.
You’ve put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they’ve invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.
There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting fourth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity, and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of power.
I don’t suppose, dear, you’re really defending the French Sunday?
Undine Spragg – how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in.
I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.
Polish Count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.
You like so much to be alone?” “Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.
ON A JANUARY EVENING of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?
Not for the world would he have made a significant to her, though it seemed to him that his life hung on her next gesture.
It’s waiting for us: it seems to know.
Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent.
Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.
Lily laughed. “Merci du compliment!
It’s all stupid and narrow and unjust – but one can’t make over society.
Every one knows you’re a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but then you’re not nasty. And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.
It was enough to make her feel a little dizzy with her triumph – to work her up into that state of perilous self-confidence in which all her worst follies had been committed.