The Portrait of a Lady, Volume 2

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Houghton Mifflin, 1909
 

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Page 196 - She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since ; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond's beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond's beautiful mind, indeed, seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.
Page 42 - XXXII IT was not of him, nevertheless, that she was thinking while she stood at the window near which we found her a while ago, and it was not of any of the matters I have rapidly sketched. She was not turned to the past, but to the immediate, impending hour. She had reason to expect a scene, and she was not fond of scenes. She was not asking herself what she should say to her visitor; this question had already been answered. What he would say to her — that was the interesting issue. It could be...
Page 436 - She never looked about her; she only darted from the spot. There were lights in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily short time - for the distance was considerable - she had moved through the darkness (for she s»w nothing) and reached the door. Here only she paused. She looked all about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.
Page 328 - ... smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome ; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the...
Page 81 - My dear girl, I can't tell you how life seems to stretch there before us — what a long summer afternoon awaits us. It's the latter half of an Italian day — with a golden haze, and the shadows just lengthening, and that divine delicacy in the light, the air, the landscape, which I have loved all my life and which you love to-day.
Page 415 - I always understood," he continued, "though it was so strange — so pitiful. You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed ; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!" "Oh yes, I've been punished," Isabel sobbed. He listened to her a little, and then continued: "Was he very bad about your coming?" "He made it very hard for me. But I don't care.
Page 352 - ... Osmond was seated at the table near the window with a folio volume before him, propped against a pile of books. This volume was open at a page of small coloured plates, and Isabel presently saw that he had been copying from it the drawing of an antique coin. A box of water-colours and fine brushes lay before him, and he had already transferred to a sheet of immaculate paper the delicate, finely-tinted disk. His back was turned toward the door, but he recognised his wife without looking round....
Page 198 - He had an immense esteem for tradition; he had told her once that the best thing in the world was to have it, but that if one was so unfortunate as not to have it one must immediately proceed to make it.
Page 356 - I'm perfectly willing, because — because — " And he paused a moment, looking as if he had something to say which would be very much to the point. " Because I think we should accept the consequence^ of our actions, and what I value most in life is the honour of a thing!
Page 164 - Just beyond the threshold of the drawing-room she stopped short, the reason for her doing so being that she had received an impression. The impression had, in strictness, nothing unprecedented; but she felt it as something new, and the soundlessness of her step gave her time to take in the scene before she interrupted it.

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