Sublime

We’ll go back to work just after Miss Catharine puts the cornflowers in her hair. This is one of our favorite moments in the movie, when the octogenarian gentlewoman Miss C is given piles of cornflowers by George and his kind-eyed father, who says, “There are no jewels more becoming a lady. I like to see them in your hair.” And so father and son

He had always wanted Daisy, with an intensity that seemed to radiate from the pores of his skin. She was sweet, kind, inventive, excessively reasonable yet absurdly romantic, her dark sparkling eyes filled with dreams.

The daughters he and his partner adopted are Eritrean, so he is touchy about anything having to do with Africa, particularly since a Fascist branch of his family made a fortune from the cotton trade in Asmara. He continues: “And a spoiled signora having a fling with the skipper is no different from a husband fucking the nanny. Just plain common.

He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature’s most naive toys. ‘It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets,’ said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment (as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.

She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies—yes, she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she

She pleases him, this shy slip of a girl who doesn’t dare to look up, who’s so unlike those flappers over there, whom he detests in a grouchy sort of way because a gramophone always rattles to life when they show up and because they sashay through the room as no woman in Holland ever would have in his day.

In Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage

returned, triumphantly carrying a bottle of 1921 Dom Pérignon. “The first vintage they made,” he said. “Historic.” They sat at the table and ate Maisie’s fish pie. Daisy drank a glass of the champagne but she found it difficult to eat. She pushed her food around the plate in an attempt to look normal. Boy had a second helping. For dessert Maisie