Sublime

The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes.

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

A pale man with pince-nez, he had the kind of face it is impossible to recall within five minutes of seeing it, and owed his appointment to the fact that all the other candidates for the Vice Chancellorship had enough personality to acquire enemies.

these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included. The

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science. But Rosamond Vincy seemed to have the true melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather t

likely have loved her—if he had been able to love any one. But nature had not endowed him with that capability. She had given

Mr Brooke was evidently in a state of nervous perturbation. When he had something painful to tell, it was usually his way to introduce it among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it were a medicine that would get a milder flavour by mixing.

She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker,5 if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said ‘Exactly’ to