Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.

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.

...It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.