F. Tennyson Jesse

“ This spring, in its wine-pale clarity, its swift shadows, its dewy brightness of flame-green leaf, seemed to Ishmael to hold the quality of youth as none had done for years. He and Nicky and Joe Killigrew and the two girls from Paradise Cottage spent whole days together, for Joe and Judith, though obviously very intimate, never seemed to wish for solitude. Together they fronted the winds and the quick showers and the bright rays, saw the rainbow lift over the dark sea, watched its passionate colour die and the sunbright foam fade to pearly dimness or break over water turned to vivid blue. ”

“ For all the time, as during the preceding days, I had felt the depression growing over me, the terror of this communal life which took all you had and left you—what? What corner of the soul is any refuge when solitude cannot be yours in which to expand it? What vagrant impulse can be cherished when liberty is not yours to indulge it?
These girls, these strong, clear-eyed creatures whom I had seen, day after day, who had at first impressed me only with their youth, their school-girl gaiety, their—horribile dictu—their "brightness"—was it possible that this life should really content them? ”

“ Lying down on her rock, she told over with the rapture of a devotee the divine excellencies of Flora Le Pettit; her radiance, her swinging, shining curls, the wings that spread from her fair arms, the light that gleamed on her bright brow and in her glancing eyes, but it was not Flora, but Loveday, who danced before her mind's eye in white raiment, and held the sorrows of the South in her eyes and the joy of youth on her lips. Flora was the excuse for that new Loveday, as the beloved is ever the excuse for the raptures transmuting the lover. ”

“ Nothing does. If I could look after you—if you were free to be looked after—you wouldn't have to go to other women any more. I care about you more than about any man I've ever met."
"And I don't care about you more than any woman I've ever met. You're unique and you're you, but I've been in love a good many times. And there's always the big one I've told you about. I feel I've so little left to give, and yet—by God, Sophia! I could give to you, even battered old I!"
"I'd be such a wife to you," said Sophia proudly, clenching her free hand, "that I should fear no other woman on earth." ”

“ Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world well lost for love—the hackneyed expression came so readily to him. "She cares for me," he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and pain, "only she doesn't care enough. It's a half-shade, and the books don't prepare one for the half-shades. Nobody can love without a flaw—we all fail each other somewhere; it's like no one being quite good or quite bad: nothing is black or white, but just varying tones of grey. They make life damned difficult, the half-shades!"
Giving his shoulders a little shake, he turned to Blanche. ”

“ To Loveday, high on her rock, between the gold of the sky and the gold of the blossom, it seemed that April must of a certainty stay as fair as this and lead to as bright a May, when that vision of her new self should become a yet brighter reality. She was confident of April because she was confident of life, lapped in an aureate glow that seemed to suffuse the very air she drew into her lungs so that it intoxicated her like the breath of a diviner ether from Olympian heights. ”

“ One afternoon she wandered out of the town by the big gates, and turning to look back at the sweeping wall she saw a narrow path that girdled its base, rising and falling over the rippling flanks of the hill. As she looked at it some dim memory stirred in her—she remembered having read in her childhood that in olden days a man might own as much land as he could encompass in one walk, returning to his starting-point. The root-instinct of enclosure was in the idea, and Sophia had a sudden fancy to make the unconscious town her own by the old method. ”

“ With evening and the last whirring of the thresher Ishmael, watching him at play, felt, as he always had, that it is impossible to watch children without an ache for the inevitable pity of it that they should have to grow up. It was not, he felt, because they are particularly happy—for never again can there be griefs blacker than those which darken all a child's horizon, but simply because they stand for something beautiful which can never come again. Now, looking at Jim and the other children, he felt the old pity, but tinged with something new. ”

“ Creation was a-dancing, and she alone stood to be mocked at in a reeling world. This was the merry measure she had striven to join! She must have been mad indeed!
Turning blindly, she ran through the crowd that gave at her approach, and all day the dancing went on without her. The flutter of her blasphemous sash did not profane the sunlight in the streets of Bugletown, nor pollute with its passing the houses of the good wives. Like a swallow's wing, it had but flashed across the ordered ways and was gone.
Yet Loveday's ambition was, after all, fulfilled that day. ”

“ Without steam or motor a ship is as powerless as though she were anchored to the sea-bottom with iron cables. Men have gone mad of it, and men did go mad of it in the starving Spirito Santo. She lay, as famished for a breeze as they for bread, upon a surface of molten glass, her sails limp as a dead bird's wing, the pitch soft in her seams, and the only sound in the circle of the horizon the faint creak-creak of her yards against the masts. Cabins and forecastle were unbearable, yet on deck the vertical sun had driven all but the thinnest lines of shadow out of being. ”

“ In the last field before the moor Ishmael pulled the corn out lavishly as a throne for her and installed her on it.
"You look like the spirit of harvest sitting there on your golden throne," he told her, and, leaning back against the rustling stook, she smiled mysteriously at him, all the glamour of the moonlight and her own womanhood in her half-shut eyes.
"Blanche ...!"
He was kneeling beside her, his hands on her shoulders. Her eyelids dropped before his gaze and she shook slightly.
"You are the most beautiful thing on earth! I love you with all my heart and soul, with every bit of me. ”

“ Motorists have not yet spoiled the population of Sant' Ambrogio, and, unmolested by any clamour for alms, Sophia passed along the shady street, where the black-haired, kerchiefed women, with their fine, rock-hewn faces and deep-set eyes, were knitting at their house doors. In the big, cool church, whose walls of banded black and white marble were quieted by the dim light, which just showed the dark gargoyles writhing like things of a dream over cornice and capital, Sophia knelt down, more to wrap herself in the peace of it than to pray. ”

“ The body may be the objective of passion, but the quality itself is what is meant by the word. It is generated in the soul and may pour itself into strange vessels."
"Or even shower its ardours upon a piece of white riband?" cried Miss Le Pettit, with a titter.
"Shall we say upon Beauty itself?" corrected Mr. Constantine more gravely than he had yet spoken. Then, with a smile, he elaborated: "For as passion is in the soul, so is beauty in the heart, and hearts have differing vision. That was Loveday's desire. ”

“ The air reeked with the rich scent; the greyness of sky and land became one neutral tone for the onslaught of those pools of flaring molten gold that burnt to heaven with their undestructive flame. And every ardent sheet of it had a grape-like bloom, made by the velvety quality of the thousands of close-set petals; they gave the sensation of exquisite touch merely by looking at them, while their passionate colour and scent made the senses drunken on pure loveliness.
That was how it had taken Boase—how in normal days it would have taken Ishmael, even more keenly. ”