He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.

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

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

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.

Life is made up of compromises.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.