So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.

But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.