It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.

You have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face.

The idea of seeing the sea - of being near it - watching its changes by sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and noonday - in calm, perhaps in storm - fills and satisfies my mind.

But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?

Spring drew on... and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that hope traversed them at night and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is (correcting himself), I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience.