The books – the generous friends who met me without suspicion – the merciful masters who never used me ill!
My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
Silence is safe.
Don’t let me think.
Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise.
The small pulse of the life within me and the great heart of th city around me seemed to be sinking in unison.
You hear more than enough of married people living together miserably. Here is an example to the contrary. Let it be a warning to some of you, and an encouragement to others. In the meantime, I will go on with my story.
Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn’t exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you! – you have married a monster.
When a sensible woman has a reasonable question put to her, and evades it by a flippant answer, it is a sure sign, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that she has something to conceal.
The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.
Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us – and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone.
We don’t want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability.
Whenever a woman tries to put you out of a temper, turn the tables, and put HER out of temper instead. They are generally prepared for every effort you can make in your own defence, but that.
We meet as mortal enemies hereafter – let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the meantime.