Only, starting over again in love is such a journey—like needing a holiday but not wanting to be bothered with packing bags and making reservations. So much trouble—being charming and artful, finding ways to pretend less affection than one feels, and in the end not succeeding, because one doesn’t really profit from experience; one merely learns to

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground—or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground—or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

Only, starting over again in love is such a journey—like needing a holiday but not wanting to be bothered with packing bags and making reservations. So much trouble—being charming and artful, finding ways to pretend less affection than one feels, and in the end not succeeding, because one doesn’t really profit from experience; one merely learns to

Through the slit that now parted the shutters, the old man stared despondently at the day. The scene, it was true, was of dimensions comparable to those of his own land—in fact, he had made the comparison all too frequently, as though Tuscany were remarkable only for this similarity—but then there was that sky. He had never experienced such a sky.

This admission seemed to her to set the seal on the dissolution of their love: total indebtedness could only be acknowledged where no attempt at repayment was contemplated.

The only criticism that might have been made of them was that their background and prospects had been provided so amply as to encroach a little on the scope of the present; nothing had been left to chance—perhaps on the assumption that chance is a detrimental element.

They were sitting, this evening, on either side of Charles Holmes, who was an Englishman, and who, from shyness, talked and listened with a habitual vagueness, glancing at Dora, his wife, sitting opposite.

She had no sense of proportion, none whatever—and wasn’t that exactly the thing one looked for in a woman?