Well—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.
Well--there it was, and the fault was doubtless neither hers nor his, but that of the world they had grown up in, of their own moral contempt for it and physical dependence on it, of his half-talents...
They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can't say as they've hurried much to make our acquaintance.
These personages, grouped about the toilet-table where the Countess sat under the hands of a Parisian hairdresser, were picturesquely relieved against the stucco panelling and narrow mirrors of the ap...
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetit...
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt....
The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as...
The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.
The extravagance in dress— Miss Jackson began. Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry’s dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even...
The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't.
The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but onl...
The Fates seldom forget the bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compound interest.
That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.
Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was...
Some men, Flamel irresistibly added, think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that,...
She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted. Archer received this strange communication in silence. His...
She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.
She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity.