Livia took Charlotte by the shoulders. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.” Charlotte’s lips stretched into a smile that did not reach her eyes. “Would that someone had given Papa that warning.
He walked to the grandfather clock and pretended to check the time on his watch, when he wanted to grab the poker next to the grate and smash everything in the room. The children they were going to have. The life they were going to share. Everything slashed and burned in a vicious assault by reality. And her, oblivious to his pain, throwing away their happiness as if it were last week’s bread.
That’s the trouble with putting women on a pedestal. You do that, and they always fall off – knocking you over on the way down.
There was so much that he didn’t know, so much that she didn’t feel that she could tell him. So much she’d never told him because she understood him better than he’d understood himself. He had always wanted to give her everything. But it had been an everything that revolved around him.
We women have been taught since birth that virtue is our greatest asset. I have nothing against virtues – I’d like to think that there are many virtues I practice assiduously. But power does not yield to virtue. Power yields only to power.
It really is too bad that sometimes inconvenient facts surface to thumb their noses at remarkably elegant hypotheses.
Mr. Marbleton tilted his head. “Do you really think of happiness as such a fragile entity?” “Mine is,” she answered, still smiling. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been properly happy. I simply careen between moments of intense buoyancy and moments of intense misery. Only my anxiety is constant: When I hope, I’m anxious that my hopes will come to nothing; when I fear, I’m anxious that my fears will all come true.
Women who appear perfectly happy sometimes live in fear of their lives. And men who give every impression in public of kindness and amiability can be monsters in private.
Everyone changed. But it was rare to meet anyone who could be relied upon to change for the better.
Livia’s heart thudded. She was good at something?
But you I want to see in all my moods. When I’m particularly pleased, when I’m simply going about my day, when I’m utterly overwhelmed, as I was yesterday and today. And it honors me that when I bring myself, I seem to have brought enough for you.
Some men’s deaths left little besides unfulfilled obligations and the inconvenience of a corpse. The departure of others tore holes in the hearts of those who were fortunate enough to know them.
She had managed to get to the truth of the matter in every case that had been entrusted to her. But truth had a vicious way of upsetting everything else on its way to the surface. And he was hard-pressed to say, as someone whose existence had been repeatedly convulsed by recent overdoses of truth, whether there had been anything satisfactory to the aftermaths.
I am a queen upon this board, Charlotte had once told Lord Ingram, and I do not play to lose.
Only my anxiety is constant: When I hope, I’m anxious that my hopes will come to nothing; when I fear, I’m anxious that my fears will all come true.
Livia, on the other hand, actively preferred literary characters to real-life acquaintances: Tom Sawyer stayed forever young, Viola always retained her spunk, and Mr. Darcy could never turn out to be a hypocrite who was also disappointing in bed.
That which is sown is not always begotten; but that which is begotten always is sown.
He made her human – or as human as she was capable of being. And being human was possibly her least favorite aspect of life.
The silence that followed was lovely, the silence of flowers blooming.
Charlotte couldn’t help laughing. “My dear lady, I feared to impose on your kindness. I see now that I needn’t have worried. You are a shark!” Mrs. Watson preened a little, evidently pleased by Charlotte’s observation. “A shark with a good nose for money in the water but, let’s say, rather soft teeth.