William John Locke

“ Have you not flaunted it in the dazzling splendour of the great world? Have you not steeped your being in the gorgeous colour of the East? Have not your pulses throbbed with an immortal passion for a woman of surpassing beauty? Have you not known, what is only accorded to the select of the sons of men, a supreme moment of delirious joy when Time stood still and Space was not? Have you not lived intensely all this wonderful year? Are you the same blank-minded, starving-souled, mild negation of a man who sat as a butt for Corinna’s pleasantries at the Petit Cornichon? ”

“ Passion had died. Hope—the hope of hearing the patter of a child’s feet about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life—hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to me an infinitely loved sister—or daughter—or granddaughter even—so old did I feel. And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world. ”

“ Connie Deering had never heard a man speak in agony of spirit. Her lot had fallen among pleasant places, where life was a smooth, shaven lawn and emotions not more violent than the ripples on a piece of ornamental water. His tone gave her a sudden fright.
“You do love her, then?” she whispered.
“Yes,” said Jimmie, drawing himself up in a tight, awkward heap on the slope. “My God, yes, I do love her. I love her with every fibre of brain and body.” ”

“ Sylvester sat opposite, his arm around Dorothy, who looked up shyly yet gladly into his face, unable to explain to her childish mind this revulsion of passionate love. To him it was a happiness that flooded his soul. The parched places drank it in like the river of life. He was a new man, able to feel in all its sacredness the sorrow that had come.
His temperament had undergone a curious transmutation. Instead of flying, as used to be his wont, to solitude, to brood over his grief, a newly awakened instinct drove him imperiously to companionship. ”

“ It was Katherine, on the other side of the wooden partition, crying her heart out. Fibres within the girl were strangely stirred, filling her with a great, yearning pity. At some moments of their lives women can touch the stars. Moved by an uncontrollable impulse she went out, knocked at Katherine's door and entered.
Katherine rose, looked at her half-bewildered; then the magnetism of the sympathy in Felicia's eyes and impulsively outstretched arms attracted her involuntarily. She made a step forward, and, with a little cry, half-sob, half-welcome, gave herself up to Felicia's clasp. ”

“ They were halcyon days for Clementina. There were neglected portraits to complete, new sitters for whom to squeeze in appointments, a host of stimulating things, not the least of which was the beloved atmosphere, half-turpentine, half-poetry, of the studio. Only the painter can know the delight of the mere feel of the long-forsaken brush, and the sight of the blobs of colour oozing out from the tubes on to the palette. Most of us, returning to toil after holiday, sigh over departed joys. To the painter the joy of getting back to his easel is worth all the joys that have departed. ”

“ If there is one spot in England where the present is the past, where the future is still more of the past, where the past wraps you and enfolds you in the dreamy mist of Gothic beauty, where the lazy meadows sloping riverward deny the passage of the centuries, where the very clouds are secular, it is the cathedral town of Durdlebury. No factory chimneys defile with their smoke its calm air, or defy its august and heaven-searching spires. No rabble of factory hands shocks its few and sedate streets. ”

“ In spite of a hopeless, passionate love Kent was still a happy man.
And now this spell of her influence was broken, or at least modified. He had seen her, felt the softness of her voice, the kindliness of her eyes. And he had unwittingly betrayed his secret. She knew that he loved her. She pitied him, promised that he should see her frequently on the basis of the old friendship. It was kind and generous, he thought, to step down from the height of her wedded felicity to comfort him with her friendship and sympathy. An unexpected happiness was in store for him. ”

“ A creature so yielding, so simple, so unaffected by experience or the obvious external lessons of the world, and yet standing serenely in the midst of the turmoil, seemed an incongruity—gave a sense of shock, a prompting to rescue, such as would arise from the sight of a child in the middle of a roadway clashing with traffic. She was made for protection, tenderness, all the sheltering luxuries and amenities of life. It was a flaw in the eternal fitness of things that she was alone, earning her livelihood, with nothing but her sweetness and innocence to guard her from buffeting and downfall. ”

“ Through one distant patch a farmhouse struck a muffled note of grey. On the left the ribbon of road glistened white between the sentinel poplars silhouetted against the sky. The hot smell of the earth filled the air like spice. A thousand elfin sounds, the vibration of leaves, the tiny crackling of cornstalks, the fairy whirr of ground insects, melted into a companionable stillness.
Blanquette half dozed, her head against Paragot's shoulder, as she had done that far-off evening of our return from Chambéry. The smoke from his porcelain pipe curled upwards through the still air. ”

“ Her eyes bore no trace of tears, her attitude not a suggestion of grief. Ill and worn she looked; but from shock and strain and anxiety—not from sorrow. Had she no human feeling? And yet she was the same woman whose heart had throbbed with wild tumult against his; whose eyes had glowed with a burning passion in their slumberous depths; whose voice had melted into murmurings like the deep notes of the mating dove. Once he had compared her in his mind to a volcano. The aptness of the similitude occurred to him now. ”

“ Their way lay through Hyde Park. The October leaves shimmered like golden scales in the afternoon sun, shedding a glory around him. The few passers-by seemed non-existent. The great stretch of lawn rolled on either side towards the just visible white house-tops. In front, the chequered path of the burnished avenue. From time to time his companion raised her delicate face to him. A slanting beam caught the light of her eyes and the gold tints of her hair under her dainty toque. A strange, unknown feeling stole upon his heart.
A great silence and splendour had fallen over life. ”

“ Lady Auriol, Colonel Lackaday and I, smitten with pagan revolt, lounged on the shady lawn in front of the red-brick, gabled manor house. The air was full of the scent of roses from border beds and of the song of thrushes and the busy chitter-chatter of starlings in the old walnut trees of the further garden. It was the restful England which the exiled and the war-weary used so often to conjure up in their dreams.
"You mean a fool can be egged on to do great things and still remain a fool?" asked Lady Auriol lazily. ”

“ As far as the eye can reach nothing suggestive of man meets the view. Nothing but the infinite barrenness of the plain, the ridges on either side, the long, straight, endless road cleaving through this abomination of desolation.
To walk through it would be a task as depressing as mortal could execute. But to the speed-drunken motorist it is a realization of dim and tremulous visions of Paradise. What need to look to right or left when you are swallowing up free mile after mile of dizzying road? Aristide looked neither to right nor left, and knew this was heaven at last. ”

“ Long as I had loved Betty in a fatherly way, deeply as I loved her now, the man's unexpected picture of her was a revelation. You see it was only after her marriage, when she had softened and grown a woman and come so near me that I felt the great comfort of her presence when she was by, the need of it when she was away. How could I have known anything of the elusiveness in her maidenhood before which he knelt so reverently?
That he so knelt is the keynote of the man's soul untainted by the flesh. ”

“ It would need not only a poet, but a master of psychology, to record the myriad vibrations of the soul as it reacts to temptations, yieldings, tremulous thrills of the flesh, exquisite apprehensions, fluttering joys, and each last voluptuous plenitude of content. It is an adventure which absorbs every faculty of the will; which ignores hunger and thirst, weariness of limb and ache of head; which makes the day a dream of reality and the night the reality of a dream. ”

“ The artistic temperament caught the impressions, instinctively, unconsciously registered them, thus widening and deepening her conception of life. It was a luxury of sense to leave the babel passion of the Casino and to walk arm in arm on the terrace or in the grounds. There the music came faintly and mingled with the far-off splash of the sea away below them and the rustle of the palms and drachinas. On the right stretched out Monaco, clustering like a group of fireflies below the white bastioned castle. ”

“ To say that I love Carlotta is to express Niagara in terms of a fountain. I crave her with everything vital in heart and brain. She is an obsession. The scent of her hair is in my nostrils, the cooing dove-notes of her voice murmur in my ears, I shut my eyes and feel the rose-petals of her lips on my cheek, the witchery of her movements dances before my eyes. ”