She often climbed up the hill and lay there alone for the mere pleasure of feeling the wind and of rubbing her cheeks in the grass. Generally at such times she did not think of anything, but lay immersed in an in an inarticulate well-being.
Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it’s all snowed under.
Something in truth lay dead between them – the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.
Just so; she’d even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it’s against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man’s again – I don’t mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don’t take enough interest in THEM.
There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.
To keep a kind of republic of the spirit – that’s what I call success.
The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe. In this case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.
Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a bluebottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare...
She was something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.
He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.
Ah, he would take her beyond – beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul.
But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of rebellion.
Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: ‘Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river’.
Oh, Gerty, I wasn’t meant to be good.
That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.
But there was something more miserable still – it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.
Original! We’re all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We’re like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can’t you and I strike out for ourselves, May?
The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them.
It’s a hundred years since we’ve met – it may be another hundred before we meet again.
His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.