One sees that dead, vacant look steal over the rarest, finest of women's faces . . . in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces . . .

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

... while the light burning within may have been divine, the outer case of the lamp was assuredly cheap enough.

... I suppose that the party or sect which is to do any work in the world must breathe its own peculiar atmosphere, speak its own little patois, and see but one side of the question on which it fights.

Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.