Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep