And don’t you say that it is very kind and obliging of him, sir, like Jessamy, because if you don’t like a person, you don’t wish to be obliged to him!
Does it ever occur to you, Mama, that my grandfather is a lunatic?
Of course she is a fool, but so are all girls.
Remind me one day to teach you how to achieve a sneer, Hugh. Yours is too pronounced, and thus but a grimace. It should be but a faint curl of the lips.
I comfort myself with the reflection that your wife will possibly be able to curb your desire – I admit, a natural one for the most part – to exterminate your fellows.
Nevertheless, she did not weep, because, for one thing, it would have made her eyes red, and another, it would be of very little use.
There is a worse tyranny than that of ill-treatment. It is the tyranny of tears, vapours, appeals to feelings of affection and of gratitude!
I am relieved. May I now have the truth?
As for the fan, she agreed that it was a most amusing trifle: just what she would wish to buy for herself, if it had not been so excessively ugly!
The more enchanted the idyll, greater must be the pain of its ending.
She succumbed to the eternal feminine passion for bargains.
I do not want a boy. I only want Monseigneur!
What I mean is, like you to have everything you want. Wished it was me, that’s all.
Depend upon it, you are just the sort of girl a man would be glad to have for his sister! You don’t even know how to swoon, and I daresay if you tried you would make wretched work of it, for all you have is common sense, and of what use is that, pray?
The Marquis believed himself to be hardened against flattery. He thought that he had experienced every variety, but he discovered that he was mistaken: the blatantly worshipful look in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, anxiously raised to his, was new to him, and it pierced his defences.
Has no one ever told you that it is the height of impropriety to kiss any gentleman, unless you have the intention of accompanying him immediately to the altar?
O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I’m not mad yet – not so mad that I don’t know how disastrous it might be to you – to us both! You don’t realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence!
You are an atrocious person! Since the day I met you I have become steadily more depraved.
Let me tell you, my girl, that I’m swallowing no more of your insults! And if I hear another word from you in disparagement of the Corinthian set it will be very much the worse for you!
God knows I’m no saint, but I don’t think I’m more of a sinner than any other man.