Sarah Grand

“ The friction of the crowd rubs out their individuality. In a crowd I feel mentally as if I were in a maze of telegraph wires. The thoughts of so many people streaming out in all directions about me entangle and bewilder me."
"You do not seem to like anything exceptional."
"No, I do not," said Beth. "I like the normal—the everyday. Great events are not the most significant, nor are great people the most typical. It is the little things that make life livable. The person who comes and talks clever is not the person we love, nor the person who interests us most. ”

“ But even her love of the beautiful was carried to excess. It was a passion with her which would, in a sturdier age, have been considered a vice. She delighted in the scent of flowers, the song of the thrushes in the spring; colour, and beautiful forms. Doubtless the emotion they caused her was pure enough, and it was natural that, highly bred, cultivated, and refined as she was, she should feel these delicate, sensuous pleasures in a greater degree than lower natures do. ”

“ How like a mind is to a river! both may be pure and transparent and lovable, and strong to support and admirable; each may mirror the beauties of earth and sky, and still have a wonderful beauty of its own to delight us; both are always moving onward, bound irresistibly to be absorbed in a great ocean mystery, to be swept away irreclaimably, without hope of return, but leaving memories of themselves in good or evil wrought by them; and both are pure at the outset, but can be contaminated, when they in turn contaminate ”

“ Beneath was a little cove sheltered from the north and south by the jutting cliffs, and floored with the firmest sand just then, for the tide was out. Beth was lying in the shadow of the cliff, but, beyond, the sun shone, the water sparkled, the sonorous sea-voice sounded from afar, while little laughing waves broke out into merry music all along the shore. Beth, lying on her face with her arms folded in front of her and her cheek resting on them, looked out, lithe, young, strong, bursting with exultation, but motionless as a manifestation of inanimate nature. ”

“ Miserable fate which robbed her of all that would have made her life worth having—a husband on whom she could rely; her child; and now the man upon whom she had been prepared to lavish the long pent-up passion, the concentrated devotion of her great and noble nature! Poor starved heart, crushed back upon itself, suffering silently, suffering always, but never hardening—on the contrary, growing tenderer for others the more it had to endure itself! Would it always be so? Was there no peace on earth for Ideala? No one who could be all her own? ”

“ It had been a long pull for a hot night, and the Tenor shipped his oars here, and threw himself back in the bow to rest. He lay looking up at the sky while they drifted back little by little with the tide. The balmy air, the lop-lop of the water against the boat, the rock and sway and sense of dreamy movement, and ever and anon the nightingales, made a time of soft excitement, such as the Boy loved.
"O Israfil!" he burst out; "isn't it delicious just to be alive?" ”

“ The day preceding Beth's birth was a grey day, a serene grey day, awesome with a certain solemnity, and singularly significant to those who seek a sign. There is a quiet mood, an inner calm, to which a grey day adds peculiar solace. It is like the relief which follows after tears, when hope begins to revive, and the warm blood throbs rebelliously to be free of the shackles of grief; a certain heaviness still lingers, but only as a luxurious languor which is a pleasure in itself. ”

“ And a state of objection is a miserable state, and a dangerous one, because it stops our growth by robbing us of half our power to love, in which lies all our strength, and which, with the delight of being loved, is the one thing worth living for. When we know in ourselves that love is heaven, and hate is hell, and all the intervals of like and dislike are antechambers to either, we possess the key to joy and sorrow, by which alone we can attain to the mystery that may not be mentioned here, but beyond which ecstasy awaits us. ”

“ The kind eyes, the kind caress, the kind thought, 'Angelica, dear'—O Daddy! I'm sorry I tormented you—sorry, sorry—The lonely grave, the lonely grave—O Israfil! 'Dead, dead, long dead, and my heart is a handful of dust.' The horses' hoofs beat out the measure of my misery. The green leaves rustle overhead. The air is delicious after the rain. The dust is laid. Only this afternoon, I went to see him; what was I thinking of? Can I bring him back again? Never again! Never again! Only this afternoon, but time is not measured by minutes. Time is measured by the consciousness of it. ”

“ Certain natures are stimulated by the grandeur of such scenes; but Beth was too delicate an instrument to be played upon so roughly. Storms within reflected the storms without only too readily. She was tempest-tossed by temperament, and, in nature, all her yearning was for repose; so that now, as they drove up the well-ordered avenue to the house, the tender tone of colour, green against quiet grey, and the easy air of affluence, so soothing after the sorrowful signs of a hard struggle for life by which her feelings had hitherto been harrowed, drew from her a deep sigh of satisfaction. ”

“ Do you know, I sometimes think that all this talk of virtue, and teaching of religion, is a kind of practical joke, gravely kept up to find a church parade of respectability for States, a profession for hundreds, and a means of influencing men by making a tender point in their nervous system to be touched, as with a rod, when necessary—a rod that is held over them always in terrorem! We all talk about morality; but try some measure of reform, and you will find that every man sees the necessity of it for his neighbour only. Goodness is happiness, and sin is disease. ”

“ You can imagine what it would be when that last loophole of escape, upon which we all rely—perhaps unconsciously—was closed, when you knew you never could return; when you came to be shut out from hope, a prey to remorse, a tired victim compelled to pursue excitement, and always to pursue it, descending all the time, and finding it escape you more and more till at last even that hateful resource was lost to you, and you found yourself at the end of the road to perdition, a worn out woman, face to face with despair! ”

“ Joy got hold of Beth as she gazed about her, feeling the beauty of the scene. With the infinite charity of childhood, she forgave her mother her trespasses against her for that day, and her little soul was filled with the peace of the newly shriven. She flourished a little wooden spade that Aunt Victoria had given her, but did not dig. The surface of the sand was all unbroken; no disfiguring foot of man had trodden the long expanse, and Beth hesitated to be the first to spoil its exquisite serenity. ”

“ One had just moved off toward the Strand, and another pulled up in its place, and the people began to alight—a fat man first in a frenzy of haste, a sallow priest whose soul seemed to sicken at the sight of the seething mass of humanity amongst which he found himself, for he hesitated perceptibly on the step, like a child in a bathing machine who shrinks from the water, before he descended and was engulfed in the crowd. ”

“ Beth asked, one day when they were sitting in a sandy hollow waiting for rabbits.
"It's not a man's work," said Jim, a trifle disconcerted.
Beth looked about her. The great sea, the vast tract of sand, and the blue sky so high above them, made her suffer for her own insignificance, and feel for the moment that nothing was worth while; but in the hollow where they sat it was cosy and the grass was green. Miniature cliffs overhung the rabbit-holes, and the dry soil was silvered by sun and wind and rain. ”

“ Claudia decided, in her common-sense tone, "that you are nursing this unholy passion, Ideala. You are afraid to give it up lest there should be nothing left to you. Can you not free your mind from the trammels of it, and grasp something higher, better, and nobler? Can you not become mistress of yourself again, and enter on a larger life which shall be full of love—not the narrow, selfish passion you are cherishing for one, but that pure and holy love which only the best— and such women as you may always be of the best—can feel for all? ”

“ Evadne said.
"There is one word more I would say, although I do not wish to influence you," Mrs. Orton Beg began hesitatingly.
"You mean submit" Evadne answered, and shook her head. "No, that word is of no use to me. Mine is rebel. It seems to me that those who dare to rebel in every age are they who make life possible for those whom temperament compels to submit. It is the rebels who extend the boundary of right little by little, narrowing the confines of wrong, and crowding it out of existence." ”

“ Winter so cold and wet; March all clouds and dust—comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb; then April is bright.
The year slips away steadily; slips round the steady year; days come and go—no, no! Days dawn and disappear, winters and springs—springs, rings, sings? No, leave that. Winter with cold and rain—pain? March storms and clouds and pain, till April once again light with it brings.
Beth jumped down from the beech boughs, ran round to the old wooden pump, clambered up by it on to the back-kitchen roof, and made for the acting-room window. ”

“ It was Ideala, herself—not as she had been, but as I always hoped she would be, and felt she might. She showed the change in every gesture, but most of all in her clear and steady eyes, which made you feel she had a purpose now, and a future yet before her. She looked as women look when they know themselves entrusted with a work, and have the courage and resolution to be true and worthy of their trust. ”

“ Angelica looked at her for a little, wondering at the delicate pink and white of her withered cheek, and becoming aware of a tune at the same time set to the words A good man! A good man! by the thundering throbbing crank as they sped along. Daddy was a good man—suppose she lost him? Nobody belonged to her as he did—suppose she lost him? There was nobody else in the world to whom she could go by right as she was going to him, nobody else in whom she had such perfect confidence, nobody on whose devotion to herself she could rely as she did on his; she was all the world to him. A good man! ”

“ The following term, Beth watched the spring come in at school with infinite yearning. To be out—to be free to sit under the apple-trees and look up through the boughs at the faintly flushed blossom, till the vision and the dream came upon her, and she passed from conscious thought into a higher phase of being—just to do that was her one desire till the petals fell. ”

“ Evadne rose also with a heavy sigh. "I know how you feel," she said to Edith drearily. "You glow and are glad from morning till night. You have a great yearning here," she clasped her hands to her breast. "You find a new delight in music, a new beauty in flowers; unaccountable joy in the warmth and brightness of the sun, and rapture not to be contained in the quiet moonlight. You despise yourself, and think your lover worthy of adoration. The consciousness of him never leaves you even in your sleep. He is your last thought at night, your first in the morning. ”

“ How can we, any of us, say we owe nothing to society, when we owe every pleasure in life to it? Do we owe nothing to those who have gone before, and whom we have to thank for the music, the painting, the poetry, and all the arts which would leave a big blank in your life, Ideala, if they ceased to exist? ”

“ So genius has no lasting griefs.
Beth utterly rejected all thought of her father in his grave, and even of her father in heaven. When her first wild grief subsided, he returned to her, to be with her, as those we love are with us always in their absence, enshrined in our happy consciousness. She never mentioned him in these days, but his presence, warm in her heart, kept her little being aglow; and it was only when people spoke to her, and distracted her attention from the thought of him, that she felt disconsolate. While she could walk with him in dreams, she cared for no other companionship. ”