The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.