Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.