there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.

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