Sublime

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

She had a proprietary way of admiring other people’s possessions, as if all good taste were in some measure a tribute to herself.

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.

Nettie and he—a sort of perseverance, a persistent understanding. Where would Nettie have found strength for the unremitting concessions of daily life? She was precipitated from delight to lamentation without logical sequence, as though life were too short; she must cram everything in and perhaps sort it out later.

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.

She had a proprietary way of admiring other people’s possessions, as if all good taste were in some measure a tribute to herself.

She thought of him as a source of knowledge rather than experience; a good, though not contemporary mind, a person rather than a man.