But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate.
Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.
His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.
He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment.
Once – twice – you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake – I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me – I understood. It was too late for happiness – but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on – don’t take it from me now!
The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed – and pitied.
Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion.
Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements.
Courage – that’s the secret! If only people who are in love weren’t always so afraid of risking their happiness by looking it in the eyes.
She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it.
Every drop of blood in Lily’s veins invited her to happiness.
Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else... There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.
What’s the use – when you will go back?” he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.
All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth.
Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of “smart” business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping.
As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.
But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar which should float them to safety.
Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.
You can’t imagine the excuses a woman will invent for a man’s not telling her that he loves her – pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if any other woman used them!