He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. Diverse et ondoyante – so he had seen her from the first.
I am horribly poor – and very expensive.
Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly indebted to any of the famous novelist’s friends who will furnish him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few regular correspondents, that letters will be of special.
She read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to be beautiful.
The February day was closing, and a ray of sunshine, slanting through a slit in the chapel wall, brought out the vision of a pale haloed head floating against the dusky background of the chancel like a water-lily on its leaf.
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.
Because I – because I want to fell you holding me,” he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.
I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.
It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to – this.
When she said to him once “It looks as if it was painted!” it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.
I didn’t know Countesses were so neighborly.
To me the only death is monotony.
You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You’re right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.
To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.
In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger.
All these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain.
He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again.
Few as they had been, they were thick with memories.
She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly; she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?
He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.