“What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.”

“What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

“She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.”

“She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.”

“She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough; it could not buy more than a few moments...”

“She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.”