I can’t escape unhappiness.
She believed just then that to let him take her in his arms would be the next thing to her dying. This belief, for a moment, was a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sink and sink.
The stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth.
Ah, be mine as I’m yours!
It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence.
They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact, solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and to belong tremendously, to each other.
I don’t care who you may be – I don’t want to know; it signifies very little to-day.
It’s very easy to laugh at her but it is not easy to be as brave as she.
She does everything beautifully. She’s complete.
The years have touched her only to enrich her; the flower of her youth had not faded; it only hung more quietly on its stem.
Life is all a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon.
He comes and looks at one’s daughter as if she were a suite of apartments; he tries the door-handles and looks out of the windows, raps on the walls and almost thinks he’ll take the place. Will you be so good as to draw up a lease? Then, on the whole, he decides that the rooms are too small; he doesn’t think he could live on a third floor; he must look out for a piano nobile. And he goes away after having got a month’s lodging in the poor little apartment for nothing.
Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration; for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips – it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.
She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her detached hand. “Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom – ” “To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.
If you’re ever bored, take my advice and get married. Your wife, indeed, may bore you in that case, but you’ll never bore yourself.
Few of the men she saw seemed worth an expenditure of imagination, and it made her smile to think that one of them should present himself as an incentive to hope and a reward of patience.
There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing you!
You’ve got no excuse for being bored anywhere. When I was your age I had never heard of such a thing.
Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost.
Oh, handsome – very, very,” I insisted; “wonderfully handsome. But infamous.” She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel – was infamous.” She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. “They were both infamous,” she finally said.