Various

“ For the moment, all Minola could do was to express full sympathy with her friend, and at the same time to counsel her gently not to betray her secret. Lucy went to her bedroom at last, much fluttering and quivering, but also relieved and encouraged, and she fell asleep, for all her love pains, long before Minola did.
"She will be very happy," Minola sat thinking, when she was alone. "She has a great deal already: a loving father, and mother, and sister; a happy home, where she is sheltered against everything; a future all full of brightness. He will love her—I suppose. ”

“ Greatly pleased was the poet and child of genius when Victor Heron asked him to come into his rooms and smoke a cigar before going to bed.
"You don't sleep much or keep early hours, I dare say, Mr. Blanchet; literary men don't, I suppose; and I only sleep when I can't help it. Let us smoke and have a talk for an hour or two."
"Night is my day," said Blanchet. "I don't think people who have minds can talk well in the hours before midnight. When I have to work in the day I sometimes close my shutters, light my gas, and fancy I am under the influences of night." ”

“ There they stood together, side by side, smiling, happy, Guido and Henrighetta, and here was poor Barnaba, still in the trappings of livery, with his heart all torn in his hands. Out in the darkness he dropped his head toward the earth. Giuseppe saw the face, and came toward him. "What is it, brother?" asked he softly. "What have you lost?" Barnaba looked up at him. His brave, firm lips trembled once. "My life," he said; "I have lost my life." There was a silence. "He that loseth his life shall find it," said Giuseppe. ”

“ I am not a famous poet, Mr. Heron, and probably never shall be. I belong to a school which does not cultivate fame, or even popularity."
"I admire you all the more for that. It always seems to me that the poet degrades his art who hunts for popularity—the poet or anybody else for that matter," added Victor, thinking of his own unpopular performances in St. Xavier's Settlements. "I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Blanchet. I have seen so much hunting after popularity in England that I honor any man of genius who has the courage to set his face against it." ”

“ Indeed, such consoling conviction belongs to the poet who philosophizes on love, or to the disappointed lover who is already beginning to be consoled. It does not do much good to any one in the actual hour of pain. Minola cordially and passionately wished that she had not loved, or seen any one whom she could love. She was full of wrath and scorn for herself, and believed herself humbled and shamed. Her whole life was crossed; her quiet was all gone; she was now doomed to an existence of perpetual self-constraint and renunciation, and even deception. ”

“ Don't you feel so sometimes, Miss Grey?"
"Oh, no; I am neither poet nor politician, and I have nothing to think about." At the moment she thought Blanchet a sham, and Heron rather a weak and foolish person for encouraging him. What would you have of men?
"I have felt so often," Mary Blanchet said with a gentle sigh.
Miss Grey did not doubt that people felt so; that everybody might feel so under appropriate conditions. It was the deliberate arranging of preliminaries by Mr. Blanchet that vexed her; it seemed so like affectation and play-acting. ”

“ She must meet Victor Heron, heaven knows how often, and talk with him as a friend, and never let one gleam of the truth appear. She must hear Lucy Money tell of her love, and be the confidante of her childlike emotions. Not often, perhaps, has a proud and sensitive girl been tried so strangely. "I thought I hated men before," she kept saying to herself. "I do hate them now; and women and all. I hate him most of all because I know that I so love him."
All this poor Minola kept saying or thinking to herself that morning as she listlessly dressed. ”

“ Only some of us can't help it."
"No," said Minola sadly; "I suppose not."
"There! You look all manner of contempt at me. I should like to have you painted as the Queen of the Amazons—you would look splendid. But I may trust to your friendly heart and your sympathy all the same, I know. You will pity us weaker girls, and you won't be too hard on us. I want you to help me."
"Can I help you, Lucy? Shall I ask Mr. Heron if he is in love with you? I will if you like." ”

“ An Englishwoman's voice is soft, but it is not weak. It is notably firm, clear, and vibrating. It is neither guttural nor nasal. While it soothes the ear, it compels attention. Like the tone of a fine old Cremona violin, its softest vibrations make themselves heard and understood when mere noise makes only confusion. Such voices are not entirely lacking among women in "America"; but, alas! how few of the fortunate possessors of such voices here use them worthily! For the other element of the beauty of the Englishwoman's speech is in her utterance. ”

“ You can play hop-scotch on one foot, but you cannot cut with one blade of a pair of scissors, and you cannot play Shakespeare by being simply picturesque. Above all, before all, for this purpose you must have the art of utterance; you must be able to give value to the divine Shakespearian line—to make it charm our ears as it charms our mind. It is of course by his picturesqueness that Mr. Irving has made his place; by small ingenuities of "business" and subtleties of action; by doing as a painter does who "goes in" for color when he cannot depend upon his drawing. ”

“ It has been said that Englishwomen dress better in full evening dress than in what is known as demi-toilette. I cannot think so. It is not the English dress that then looks better, but the Englishwoman; that is, if she has fine shoulders, breasts, and arms. It is the beauty that is revealed, the woman pure and simple, that pleases the eye, just as is the case elsewhere. For the things that an Englishwoman will put on, or put half-off herself, in the evening, are amazing to behold. ”

“ Life has treated me poorly, but I owe her no grudge. Guido and his wife have gone away. Giuseppe is visiting the poor. Pietro is at his priestly work—what is it? The others are back in their lives." Barnaba walks in the grove alone, and repeats to himself: "There is a road, and the name of it is Patience. The flowers that grow by it are few, but they are very sweet; and if you pluck them and weave them into a crown, the fragrance shall last forever." And Barnaba smiles.
Mary Murdoch Mason. ”

“ Minola received a coldly forgiving answer from Mr. Saulsbury—forgiving her upon his own account, which was more than Minola had sought—but adding, that he had not thought it desirable to withdraw, for a moment, by the memory of earthly controversies, the mind of his wife from the contemplation of that well-merited heaven which was opening upon her. Great goodness has one other advantage in addition to all the rest over unconverted error; it can, out of its own beatification, find a means of rebuking those with whom it is not on terms of friendship. ”

“ Minola, too, had always in her own breast resented with anger and contempt the idea that a man and woman can never be brought together and allowed to walk in the beaten way of friendship without their forthwith wandering off into the thickets and thorny places of love. All such ideas she looked upon as imbecility, and scorned. "I don't like men," she used to say to herself and even to others pretty freely. "I never saw a man fit to hold a candle to my Alceste. I never saw the man who seemed to me worth a woman's troubling her heart about." ”

“ I am a restless sort of person and must be doing something, and my own business is now in that awful stage when there is nothing practical or active to be done with it. I find it easier to get up an appearance of prodigious activity about some other person's affairs. And then, Miss Grey, I don't mind confessing that I am rather sensitive and morbid—egotistic, I suppose—and if any one looks coldly on me when I endeavor to interest him in my own affairs, I take it to heart more than if it were the business of somebody else I had in hand. ”

“ A delicate, finely-graduated bloom is not common. The rosy cheeks when looked at closely are often streaked with fine lines and mottled with minute spots of red; and the white is still oftener not like that of a lily, or, better, of a white rose, but of some much coarser object in nature. It is true that in making these odious comparisons I cannot forget certain women, too common in "America," who seem to be composed in equal parts of mind and leather, the elements of body and soul being left out so far as is consistent with existence in human form. ”

“ There is always a mute appeal from her womanhood to your manhood. This charm belongs to the Englishwoman of all ranks, and beautifies everything that she does, even if she does it awkwardly, which is not always. She shows it if she is a great lady and welcomes you, or if she is a housemaid and serves you. Not actually every Englishwoman is thus of course; for there are hard, and proud, and cruel, and debased women there, as there are elsewhere. But, apart from these exceptions, this is the manner of Englishwomen ”

“ I am very fond of my Lucelet. She isn't strong; she hasn't great intelligence. I know my little goose is not a swan, but she is very sweet, and sensitive, and loving: the most affectionate little creature that ever was made happy or unhappy by a man. I am morbidly anxious about her happiness. Now, you are her friend, and a thousand times cleverer and stronger than she, and she looks up to you. She would tell you anything. Has she told you anything lately?"
Minola hesitated. ”

“ If the dying are often the most egotistic and self-complacent of all human creatures, and are apt to make of their very condition a fresh title to lord it for the moment over the living—as if none had ever died before, and none would die after them, and therefore the world must pay special attention and homage to them—if this is so, Minola did not then know it or think about it.
The one thing on earth which Mr. Sheppard most loved to see was woman amenable to authority. He longed more passionately than ever to make Minola his wife. ”

“ Minola said. "I can promise you for one, Lucy dear; and if I could promise you for the other too, you might be sure of him. He must be a very insensible person, Lucy, who fails to appreciate you. Only don't make it too plain, dear, to any one but me. They say that men like to do the love-making for themselves—and you have not the slightest need to go out of your way. ”

“ I suppose I should have thought so once, but never since I held my baby in my arms, and she's a far more wonderful creation to me than any old master's cherub I ever copied. And not my baby alone, but all babies. I never pass one in the street now, ever so ugly or dirty, without a warm feeling for it, and no charity opens my purse so quickly as a crêche, or a foundling, or orphan asylum. I could have been very happy as an artist always. Art is full of the noblest strength and compensations, and I own that the ordinary life of the English Philistine is irksome to me to the last degree ”

“ Remain a long time in any country, and you come to accept the manners and customs of that country as the standard of civilization—the normal type. Other manners and customs, even if they spring from the same soil from which you yourself have sprung, acquire by contrast an unreasonable, a violent, but often a picturesque relief. To what one may call a continentalized vision the aspect of English life seems strange and entertaining; while an Anglicized perception finds, beyond the narrow channel, even greater matter for wonderment. ”

“ Hall might, with a little forethought, have so arranged his affairs that he would have been out of reach and past recognition before suspicion was aroused, not to say before a hue and cry was raised. But as it was, this astute lawyer, this crafty politician, who has been familiar with the ways of tricky people all his life, who knows by constant intercourse with them the habits of men that fly and men that pursue, who is practically acquainted with journalism, does just what defeats his purpose—whatever was the occasion of his leaving New York so suddenly, as to which we say nothing. ”

“ Even the custom of firing a cannon, one great noise, heard at the furthest boundaries of the parish, and then done with, would be better than the continual repetition of the strokes of a bell, now violent and quick, as though calling out all the hose and hook and ladder companies of the fire department, now slowly dying away, tantalizing the listener with the expectation that now at last they are really going to cease, only to bitterly disappoint him by breaking out again with renewed clamor. ”

“ Englishwomen are companions, and friends, and helps to their fathers, their husbands, to all the men of their household. They are not absorbed in the mere external affairs of society; and society is not entirely in their hands. Men, men of mature years, form the substance of English society; they give it its tone; women its grace and its ornamentation. Even in the Englishwoman's drawing-room the Englishman is looked up to and treated with deference. ”

“ It is not necessary to be a blind admirer of General Grant, or a member of the party which made him twice President, to do him the justice of admitting that his resignation of the office which he won with such eclat, and held with such general honor, the world over, was a sacrifice to the good of the Union for which he fought. He had for life a position equally honorable with that of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and more striking in its distinction. He had no superior but the President of the United States; not a certain man, but the incumbent of the office for the time being. ”

“ This first step is to go to an agency in an expensive street out of Piccadilly, and there purchase a stall for the sum of eleven shillings. You receive your ticket from the hands of a smooth, sleek, bottle-nosed clerk, who seems for all the world as if he had stepped straight out of a volume of Dickens or of Thackeray. There is almost always an old lady taking seats for the play, with a heavy carriage in waiting at the door; the number of old ladies whom one has to squeeze past in the stalls is in fact very striking. ”

“ You know that anybody who likes can find out everything about people's wills, and all that. Do you know anything about your father's will?"
"No," Minola said, with a start, and feeling the tears coming to her eyes. "I don't, Mr. Money. At least, not much. I know that he left me some money—so much every year; not much—it would not be much for Lucy—but enough for me and Mary Blanchet. Mary Blanchet manages it for me, and makes it go twice as far as I could. We never spend it all—I mean, we haven't spent it all this year. I should never be able to manage or to get on at all only for her." ”

“ Theresa Money said; "and Reginald" (Theresa's engaged lover) "thinks very highly of her."
"She always praises men, and they all think highly of her," Lucy persisted; "and it is something to be Lady Anything."
"I assure you, Miss Grey," Mrs. Money said, "that Lady Limpenny is the most sincere and unpretending creature. She is not an aristocrat—she has nothing to do with aristocracy; if she had, there could be little sympathy, as you may well believe, between her and me, for you know my convictions. The aristocracies of this country are its ruin! ”

“ Nor is it even a sign of good taste in any other particular. You shall see a woman who has come out of the slums, and whose life is worthy of her origin and her breeding, although it may have become gilded and garish, and she shall dress herself daily, morning, noon, and night, with such an exquisite sense of fitness in all things, with such an instinctive appreciation of harmony of outline and color, that your eye will be soothed with the sight of her apparel ”

“ Womanhood looks out from an Englishwoman's eyes; it speaks in every inflection of her voice. No matter how clever she may be, how well informed, she never utters mind pure and simple; she never lays a bare statement of thought or of fact before you. She is too modest. A piece of her mind she does, indeed, sometimes give you. But then, be sure, she is, of all times, the most thoroughly womanlike and absolved from intellectuality ”