As she always did on any really important day, Penelope Hayes wore red.
Love is all right, as things go, but lovers can be a terrible waste of a girl’s time.
He turned his dark eyes on the girl whom he had dreamed of so often over the previous months. Beside him, at that very moment of existence, at the heart of torrential downpour, she was exquisitely real, and she, too, seemed content to go on sitting there forever.
They were a society whose chief vocations were to entertain and be entertained...
Oh yes, well, I find myself unconventional everywhere.
The world is such a marvel-it gave you trials, but if you were still and concentrated, if you tried to do the right thing, it always provided you with salvation.
Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family’s Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.
It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer.
So this is how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends.
She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose.
A lady must retain always her composure. Even in a rainstorm, she must appear joyous and dry. When she loses her composure, then the respect of her peers and her staff will follow in short order.
She should have know that villains often come with pretty faces.
Already she could feel the stunning weight of a lifetime of regret for letting him go, and she knew that it was enought to bury her alive.
Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steel trap.
Henry closed his eyes and imagined the sweet petulant woundedness with which she had stared at him on the beach. He felt a little proud that she could love him.
They were all dressed in their finest as though life really were some magical stage play in which every moment ought to be illuminated with its own bright spotlight.
A man is made in the rough-and-tumble of the world a lady emerges from the flossy back rooms of her own imagination.
It seemed to her as though everything that was good and true had been blasted out of the world. All those things had been crushed destroyed made to disappear.
She was trying to sound tough and impatient, but she knew that vulnerable desire to be wooed was still brimming in her tone.
Henry turned his hat in his hands but went on looking at Diana in a way that made her want to crawl into his arms and stay there forever.
Life was a short window and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop.